MyHeritage: Family Tree & DNA

Review by eFreeware

MyHeritage is a genealogy app for Android from MyHeritage.com, sitting in the Books & Reference category. It combines a family tree builder with search tools that look through historical records and other people's trees, and it adds a set of photo features that animate or restore old family pictures. The download is free, there are in-app purchases, and the app carries no ads.

The reason to consider it is the matching. Rather than asking you to hunt through archives yourself, the app takes the names you enter and looks for connections automatically, which is the part of family history research that usually eats the most time. With more than 10 million installs and a 4.4 average across 257,435 ratings, it is clearly being used at scale, and it has been available since December 2011.

What I find appealing is that the app covers several stages of the hobby in one place: building the tree, finding records to fill it out, and doing something with the photographs you inherit along the way. If you have ever started a family tree by hand and stalled after two generations, the automated search is the feature most likely to get you past that point.

LiveMemory and the photo animation idea

The feature the developer leads with now is LiveMemory, which turns a photograph into a short video clip. You can animate a single portrait or an entire family group photo, and the result is meant to reenact a moment as though it were being filmed. The developer pitches it as a way to relive favorite memories, and the app lets you share the clips on social media.

This sits alongside Deep Nostalgia, an earlier feature with a narrower job: it animates the faces in historical photographs so that ancestors appear to move. Between the two, the app is trying to make old pictures feel less static, and both lean on the same underlying idea that a still image can be given a sense of motion.

I would treat these as the emotional hook rather than the core of the app. They are the parts you show relatives at a gathering, and they are easy to understand without any interest in genealogy. Whether that is enough to keep you coming back depends on whether you also want the research side, because the tree building and record searching are where the real work happens.

Building a tree that fills itself in

You enter a few names, then the app builds the tree for you. When it finds something relevant, it offers it to you rather than making you go looking.

Three tools do the matching. Smart Matches compares your tree against other people's trees and surfaces new details about where your family came from. Record Matches looks through the historical record collections for information about specific ancestors. Instant Discoveries goes further and adds whole branches, along with photos, to your tree in a single step.

The historical records themselves are broad. They include birth, marriage and death records from 66 countries, census and immigration records, and gravestone and burial records, among others. For anyone whose family moved between countries, that mix of vital, census and immigration material is the combination that usually breaks through a brick wall.

What I like about this approach is that it lowers the barrier for people who do not know how to research. What I would keep in mind is that automatic matching is a starting point, not a conclusion: the app proposes connections, and the judgment about whether a proposed ancestor is really yours stays with you.

Photo repair, colorizing and the stories behind the pictures

Beyond animation, the app includes a set of tools for the photographs themselves. You can scan family photos directly from the app, which saves a step if your originals are in albums rather than already on your phone. Photo Repair addresses scratched or damaged pictures, the Photo Enhancer sharpens blurry faces, and black and white images can be colorized.

There is also Photo Storyteller, which lets you record the stories behind particular photographs so they are preserved alongside the images. That is a quieter feature than the animation tools, but for anyone who has inherited a box of unidentified pictures, attaching a voice to a face is a sensible way to keep the context from disappearing.

Taken together, this side of the app is about rescuing material that would otherwise degrade or go unexplained. It is not the reason most people download a genealogy app, but it is the part that tends to matter to families once the research is done.

What the app asks of you

The app is free to download and contains no ads, but it does offer in-app purchases. I would go in expecting that some of what you see sits behind a payment of some kind. That is worth knowing before you invest an evening in building a tree.

The DNA side is a separate matter. It requires a cheek swab test, which is a physical product rather than something the app does on its own. The results cover 2,114 geographic regions, which the developer describes as more than any other test, and they match you against a DNA database of 5.2 million people. You view those results in the app. The developer says the information stays private and is never shared or sold.

So the practical requirements are modest for the research features, since those work from what you type in, but the DNA component depends on ordering and completing a test first. The photo animation and repair tools sit in between: they need your pictures, not a kit.

How I would approach it

If you are starting from nothing, my suggestion is to enter what you already know before touching any of the automated features. A handful of accurate names and dates gives the matching technology something solid to work with, and it makes the suggestions you get back easier to evaluate. Vague starting points tend to produce vague matches.

Once results start arriving, work through them in small batches rather than accepting everything at once. Instant Discoveries can add entire branches in one click, which is convenient, but a branch added carelessly is harder to unpick later than one added deliberately. I would also scan and repair the photographs early, while the people who can identify the faces are still around to confirm them.

The DNA results are the piece I would leave until last, since they are the least useful if your tree is still mostly empty. They make more sense once you have names to attach the regional breakdown to.

For anyone who wants to see what the app does before committing, the animation features are the easiest entry point. They need nothing but a photograph, and they give a fair sense of how the app handles the material you would eventually be working with.

A genealogy app for people who want the searching done for them

MyHeritage is best suited to someone with a genuine curiosity about their family and limited patience for archive work. The app's strength is that it does the looking and hands you the findings, and the scale of the tree and record collections means there is a reasonable chance of finding something. It is a natural fit for the person in a family who ends up holding the photographs and the half-finished notes.

The caveats are straightforward. In-app purchases are part of the package, and the DNA features depend on a separate test. The photo animation tools are enjoyable but they are not research, and anyone hoping the app will simply produce a complete family history should expect to make some decisions along the way.

Weighed against that, the combination is hard to match in a single download: tree building, record matching, photo restoration and DNA results in one place, free to install and free of ads. I would recommend it to anyone ready to spend a few evenings on their family history, and to anyone who just wants to see a great-grandmother's photograph move.

What's new in version 7.5.63

New! Make your memories come to life in video with LiveMemory™. LiveMemory™ enables you to relive your favorite memories by turning any photo into a short video clip using AI. Animate whole photos to reenact nostalgic family memories as if you were there. Perfect for sharing with family and friends!