Our Volunteers: Making a difference in Portuguese

This month, we are spotlighting MyHeritage volunteer Airton Minchoni, who has been helping to translate MyHeritage products into Portuguese (Brazil) during the past year.

Airton Minchoni and family

Born in southeastern Brazil, he moved as a teenager with his family to the northeast. The distance caused him to lose contact with some relatives, but he took advantage of every visit to his grandparents’ home to learn more about his family history and his grandparents’ generation. That was the start of his family history journey.

Today, Airton and his family live in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil.

He joined MyHeritage when he first began searching for his ancestors in 2008. After reading blogs, he discovered that MyHeritage was a leading destination for family history research. Although it was the tree-building capabilities that brought him in, he soon realized that that was just one feature offered, and there were many other great features on MyHeritage.

The best one, for me, is the Smart Match feature, because I can find matches in several family trees and can then figure out information that I wouldn’t have access to in a standard search.

Airton has had several interesting discoveries using MyHeritage Smart Matches.

The first one was that one of my paternal great-grandparents had remarried and came to Brazil with her second husband. I was completely unaware of this but gathered it from my research. MyHeritage presented me with Smart Matches and I even located their descendants. Another interesting thing that happened was getting Smart Matches with a Portuguese researcher and MyHeritage user Miguel Rodrigues, who is related to one of my paternal great-grandparents. We’ve exchanged some important information.

Airton’s ancestors come from mainly Italy and Portugal. He has grown his family tree to 1,259 individuals!

Airton Minchoni with relatives

MyHeritage was an important tool in organizing my research and providing me with a better understanding of the connections between my relatives.

Genealogical research has become a great hobby for Airton. Along the way, he realized that collaboration would help his search and help others as well. He decided to volunteer to translate MyHeritage products for the use of others, and enjoys doing so. He also hopes to help with transcribing gravestones in the future.

We want to thank Airton for his help!

Do you speak another language at the native level? Would you like to join our volunteer team? It’s a wonderful way to help families learn about their roots easily, with all information available in their native languages.

To learn more about becoming a volunteer, email us at translate@myheritage.com.