What is a "smart match"?

Question

I am finding profiles (now abandoned) which seem to have been added because of something called a "smart match"

Pace-175 says "Added by confirming a Smart Match"

Pace-165 says "Added by confirming a Smart Match"

What is smart matching?  Is this useful in any way to identify these profiles?  Especially Pace-165 is going to be very difficult to figure out who it is supposed to represent.  Anyone have any ideas?

Comments

It doesn't sound very smart to me!

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When I need to work on these types of profiles I usually pick the person in the family with the most unique name and start there, also a male is generally easier because their name remains the same in their lifetime.  I started with his youngest son Matthew Overstreet Pace (which should be a one-off type of name) and I already see a Find a Grave and now I'm seeing the whole family in census records. I'll add a few records for you to get the family started.  What is on the profiles is mostly nonsense (but it was enough to establish the necessary leads to find the family).

Answer 1

Cynthia,

Most of the time I see these they come from a gedcom file.  Smart Matches™, is a trade mark on MyHeritage.  Usually if the match is left from the gedcom it means that the information was not reviewed or evaluated and probably should be discarded and a real souce found.

Comments

Yes, I see it only as a way to match your information with information from other people's family trees, which I have learned to distrust for accuracy. I quit My Heritage because I really didn't care for this, and the fact that you have to purchase separate ''data packages'' to actually view any sources. This is a purchase in addidtion to the subscription so IMHO it's quite the ripoff.

Answer 2

Hi William M

Smart Match is a program that My Heritage use: I myself have no further knowlage about it. There are actualy no way to verify the data unless you are a member of My Heritage. 

This is what  I found on there website: Hope it helps in some way. 

 

It is a unique technology that  pedigree intelligent compared to hundreds of millions of profiles in different pedigrees :
View all Smart Matches
Receive notification of new similarities
Compare your family tree with corresponding trees
Copy information and photos on your family tree

Comments

So does this mean the text came from a gedcom that had been exported from MyHeritage and then uploaded here?

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MyHeritage scans members' family trees and looks for matching records and similar records in other members' trees. It periodically sends out messages saying something like "Good news, MyHeritage.com found 673 Smart Matches for you!" When a member "confirms" that the matching record in someone else's tree is indeed the same person, they are invited to copy data from the other person's tree, and MyHeritage adds a reference citation to their tree identifying the other person's tree as a data source (even if no data was copied) and indicating that the record was created by confirming a SmartMatch. MyHeritage also sends messages saying that some other member has confirmed a SmartMatch with my family tree, and won't I please check the match and confimr it or reject it in order to give feedback to that member. It took me a while to realize that if I confirmed a match just to be friendly, that other person's family tree would be added to my database as a source.

Thus, this is yet another way that other people's electronic family trees get propagated across the Internet without critical analysis. And, yes, a reference to a "Smart Match" does indicate that the gedcom record was created in somebody's MyHeritage software. But the indication that a SmartMatch was the data source may or may not be true.

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Thank you, all!

You gave me enough information to find a citation (not the best, but it was an identifier), so I was able to propose/merge William and his wife with their duplicates.