MyHeritage acquires Legacy Family Tree and discounts on Legacy webinar subscriptions

It was announced last week that MyHeritage have acquired the Millennia Corporation, the company who produce Legacy Family Tree genealogy desktop software and who also run the popular Legacy Family Tree Webinars.

For further details on this acquisition you can read the statements from MyHeritage and Legacy:

• MyHeritage Acquires the Legacy Family Tree Software and Webinar Platform MyHeritage blog, 3rd August 2017
• Legacy FamilyTree has a new home with MyHeritage Legacy News, 3 August 2017

For commentary on the acquisition I recommend reading the following two articles which provide interesting insights and perspectives:

• MyHeritage acquires Legacy Family Tree: is this good for the genealogy industry? Good for genealogists? by Thomas MacEntee, Abundant Genealogy, 4 August 2017
• MyHeritage buys Millennia by Tamura Jones, Modern Software Experience, 7 August 2017.

I'm not a Legacy user so I'm not affected by this change. (I use the British family tree program Family Historian which I highly recommend.) However, it will be interesting to see what impact this change has on the genealogy market and how MyHeritage and Legacy move forwards. The increased exposure through the Legacy webinar platform is likely to help MyHeritage improve their share of the DNA testing market.

Most of the Legacy webinars are free to view in the first week but you need to have a subscription to access the webinar archive and some premium webinars. It's also often necessary to have a subscription to access the speakers' handouts. Much of the content up until now has been aimed at US researchers but there have also been other webinars of more general interest. I've enjoyed watching a few webinars about DNA testing, particularly those from Blaine Bettinger and Diahan Southard, who always do an excellent job of explaining complicated science in easy-to-understand language. To celebrate the acquisition there is a special offer on the annual Legacy webinar subscription and it is on sale for just $24.98 (£19) until 13th August, which is 50% off the usual price. I've decided to splash out, as there quite a few webinars I would have liked to have seen that for one reason or another I didn't have time to watch when they first became available.