David Greenberg has been researching his family history for nearly 40 years, all the while believing that most of his relatives perished during the Holocaust. His grandfather, Isaac, had emigrated from Lithuania to the United States at the beginning of the last century and found it nearly impossible to access records on relatives left behind the Iron Curtain. His grandson, however, made a remarkable discovery, finding a 96-year-old aunt and 30 cousins still alive.

 

Greenberg had one thing going for him that his grandfather didn't: The Internet, specifically a web-based service from the Israeli company MyHeritage. When Greenberg and a member of the Lithuanian side of the family began to build their family trees separately, MyHeritage's "SmartMatch" feature put the two together.

 

Greenberg's story is just one of the many pairings that MyHeritage has facilitated in its nearly 10 years of operation. Company co-founder Yuval Ben Galim, 39, positively beams when discussing the role MyHeritage plays in enabling genealogical detectives to sleuth out their roots.

 

MyHeritage is by far the largest and fastest growing genealogy service, with 60 million registered users, 800 million individual profiles and 20 million family trees. This is all the more impressive given that MyHeritage's closest competitor, Geni, received $100 million in VC investment to launch its service, while MyHeritage couldn't raise a dime. In 2002, when the service began, there were no blogs, no social networks like Facebook. Investors, still reeling from the dot.com bust of two years before, just didn't get it.

 

Founder Gilad Japhet wound up mortgaging his home in order to bootstrap the fledgling company. Today, with the online world utterly interconnected, MyHeritage makes sense. It has raised a total of $24 million, has a staff of 68 employees in Israel, another 15 worldwide, and volunteer community managers for each of the countries it supports.

 

MyHeritage is now adding over a million new profiles a day while Geni has floundered with only 17,000 additional profiles in the same time period. (Ancestry.com, another genealogy site, is more focused on research tools than family trees.)

 

 

 

What's MyHeritage's secret to success? Ben Galim says it's a combination of two factors. First, MyHeritage has been global from day one. The site now supports 38 languages (meaning both the interface and the ability to add non-Western characters such as Hebrew or Cyrillic). It took Geni almost three years to add languages beyond English, he says.

 

Second, MyHeritage allows its users to import existing family trees, another feature that was initially lacking in Geni. That's a big deal for both amateur and professional genealogists who may have spent years building their own trees and would be quite put out having to type them in all over again.

Both MyHeritage and Geni make it easy to build family trees. You start by entering information about yourself, then add parents, children, spouses and everyone else you can think of. You can create timelines, upload family photos and events. All new users are sent an email to join and enter their own information. The concept is inherently viral.

 

Only the basic package is free. Whereas Geni allows users to input an unlimited number of profiles, MyHeritage charges about $6 per month beyond 250. But Ben Galim says that users are willing to pay up for MyHeritage's tools, such as the SmartMatch that helped David Greenberg find his hidden family. SmartMatch, Ben Galim explains, uses sophisticated algorithms to suggest possible family connections. For example, it knows that "Jacob" and "Yaki" are variants of the same name. Ben Galim says that MyHeritage is making about 20 million smart matches every month.

 

 

 

MyHeritage is now working with third-party developers. In September, the company released a "family API," which allows outside companies to integrate MyHeritage data. This might involve adding functionality to a family event-planning site, where users can tap into their family tree to send out invitations and RSVPs. Or it might be an entirely new service, like a trivia or memory game that uses family members for the "cards."

 

The new API could also earn you a few bucks: MyHeritage is offering a prize of $10,000 to the developer who creates the best family app. The winner will be chosen by a public vote and announced on December 15, 2011. Also in September, MyHeritage bought BackupMyTree, a service that backs up family trees to the cloud for safekeeping. It's MyHeritage's sixth acquisition to date.

 

Ben Galim hasn't had to search his own family history using MyHeritage, but his is a classic story nevertheless. His grandfather fled Europe just before Hitler conquered Poland. He sailed on an illegal boat to Israel, and to avoid being caught by the British and potentially sent back to the Nazis, he jumped ship and swam to shore. He subsequently changed his name to "Ben Galim" (Son of the Waves) since "gal" means wave. Now, that's certainly a heritage worth preserving.