It would be interesting to be able to include them as a ’sub-tree’ of our individual immediate families. My sister commented that she would appreciate this too. I have such memories of the pets of my mother, my grandmother, aunts and uncles. When I look back, many of their stereotypical behaviors associated with the various breeds of their pets – are someone reflective of some of the personality traits those family members exhibited, or exhibit.

We said that it would be nice to have a little circle, or diamond under each name that would permit us to add significant pets through our history. Some of which are better documented than the people themselves through family photos, letters and stories shared amongst the family.

Pets have played a huge part in my life. Sources of inspiration to just be better people – caring, emotionally-open, transparent and honest. They’ve comforted me at times of loss and sadness; they’ve inspired and reveled with me at times of pleasure. They have caused me great consternation, as well as much of the happiness that I have known.

I am interested to learn how others respond and view the role of pets in the family history over time and their inclination to include or exclude their pets in the records they are completing.

Maybe if the world was perfect and there was a ‘pet’ option when adding, but most likely a lot of people wouldn’t check that option. If the options included specific species, no doubt some would get left out. (Ex: Cat, Dog, Rabbit, Mouse, Lizard, Frog, Horse, Alpaca, etc…)

Since MyHeritage is also used for expanding one’s family tree through matches and by checking for similiarities and differences between multiple matches, I would see adding pets as a possible hindrance to this function.

That being said, with enough work and planning, it could be possible to add a pets option with minor flaws, but the likely hood of that is slim. If it’s done wrong, it could have negative effects on the reliability of searches and a key function of this site. (Albeit, other people’s research – if not cited – may need to be taken with a grain of salt anyways.) I know the more current branches are usually (more) private, but perhaps someday, in later generations, they’ll be doing genealogy, too.