MyHeritage has introduced a new facet to their family trees. Users can already display trees as a descendancy chart, a pedigree view or a fan chart. I mostly use the pedigree view as a first step and then the descendancy one if a tree I’m looking at doesn’t show much in the other view. Fan charts are pretty but I admit I rarely use them.
MH announced this week that you could now add flags to the tree to display the different nationalities of your ancestors. Their blog post specifies that if you turn it on and have a country as part of birth or death section for an individual, it will apply a flag.
There’s a few issues with this. Firstly, not all countries have the same borders today as they had in the time when your ancestor lived. Nationalities change. A friend of mine has Hungarian parents but one of them was born in what is now Czechia. And in Ireland’s case, much as it may pain us to admit it, technically our nationality was British until 1922. MyHeritage’s blog says they’ll apply the modern nation’s flag, but I can see that irritating people. I set about adding better definition to my tree to play with this. As most of my ancestry is Irish, I usually just put the location within Ireland for speed.
I noticed a couple of things. One of my ancestors, George Walters, was born in Liverpool. I had his birthplace in as “Liverpool, UK” and MyHeritage applied the Union Jack flag. But if I put it in as England, as I did for his mother, Mary Conrwall, then an English flag comes up. They will break the UK into its four constituent parts and apply the relevant flag. George’s father was indeed born in India, but only because his Dad was in the British army, so that looks a little deceptive, although still cool.
It also threw up something funny. My ancestor, James Lawless, was born in a place that was then called Kingstown. It’s modern day Dun Laoghaire, a large port just south of Dublin in the east of the country. My tree just had the word Kingstown in for his birth place and MyHeritage decided this was in St Vincent and the Grenadines!
I have now added Dublin and Ireland into his profile and he’s back to being Irish again!
Overall, a fun little feature. Someone with more diverse ancestry will get more out of it. They will apply state flags for the USA and province flags for Canada too.