Disclaimer: I am a MyHeritage Friend and receive a complimentary subscription. However, my opinion isn’t influenced in any way. I only promote great products on this blog and try not to do it too often!
UPDATE: Free Scandinavian Records – 5-8 June 2025!!!
In honor of both Danish Constitution Day and Swedish National Day, MyHeritage is opening up every Danish and Swedish historical record — over 350 million in total — for free, from June 5–8, 2025!
The Danish records include 31 collections with church books, censuses, newspapers, and more, covering vital events and everyday life since 1787; and the Swedish collections span from the 1600s onward, featuring household examination rolls, birth and death records, military lists, and more. Just last month, we added a collection of Swedish passenger lists documenting the names, birthplaces, residences, and destinations of Swedes who left the country between 1869 and 1951.
MyHeritage made two big announcements this week. I received an email, but their blog gives more complete information.
The first concerns the addition of a collection of French newspapers:
We’re happy to announce the release of a new historical record collection on MyHeritage: France, Names & Stories in Newspapers. This collection includes 731 million structured records extracted from French newspapers. These records were created using advanced AI technology developed in-house by MyHeritage.
This is the first Names & Stories collection on MyHeritage in a language other than English — following the 11.6 billion English-language records published previously in 15 other collections.
Search France, Names & Stories in Newspapers
Historical newspapers offer rich details for family history that official records often lack. They add color and context — stories of everyday life, personal achievements, public recognition, photos, and much more. With the Names & Stories collections, these stories are searchable and also matched to your family tree. You can uncover surprising new details — even about relatives you didn’t think to search for.
Records in this collection typically include full names and identified relationships, relevant locations, occupations, and associated institutions, as well as the newspaper title, publication date, and place. They provide a snippet of text from the newspaper, a short article summary generated by AI, and the full scanned text (OCR) of the article. In addition, each record includes a link to view the original full scan of the newspaper page on the Gallica.fr website.
Second, MyHeritage has a new partnership with Scan Cafe. Again, the blog post is way more complete than my message:
We’re excited to announce a new partnership with ScanCafe, the leading photo and video digitization service in the U.S., to provide an easy and safe way to digitize family memories. Through this collaboration, MyHeritage users in the United States can digitize their media with ScanCafe, and have it automatically transferred for safekeeping on MyHeritage through a seamless and secure account integration.
MyHeritage offers so many unique collections and opportunities for genealogy researchers. If you aren’t already a subscriber, check it out!