Meet the MyHeritage Research Team

Updated July 2022

The Research team at MyHeritage is made up of talented researchers from the fields of genealogy, history, and journalism. The team digs deep to uncover the details of family stories and facilitate family reunions. In this post, we introduce you to the members of the team, who will share a bit about their backgrounds and their passion for research.

Roi Mandel:

“Every family, without exception, has a wonderful story in their family history,” says Roi Mandel, who leads the Research team at MyHeritage. “Sometimes it’s out there and all you need to do is pick it up — and sometimes you must dive in to the old albums and letters, to remove the dust and reveal the story. Curiosity is the key to uncovering the fascinating story inside each family.”

One of his most powerful stories, a family reunion of two Korean sisters, who were abandoned as babies at the train station in South Korea and after 40 years found each other thanks to a DNA match, turned into a documentary movie that he directed, called “The Missing Piece“.

With 15 years of experience in journalism as a news and magazine correspondent and a great love of history and human stories, Roi is responsible for finding and researching the amazing stories of MyHeritage users and reuniting families all over the world. He and his team are also using MyHeritage’s incredible database, every day, to shed light on historical figures and events. “It’s a privilege to work in a place that gives you the opportunity to hear so many amazing stories of people whose lives were changed — who found long-lost relatives after many years of searching.”

Married with 3 children, Roi was born in Israel and has a B.A. in Media Studies and History. He joined MyHeritage in 2015, immediately making his mark with the “Real Uncle Sam” story that was published in the New York Times, and an intensive historical research on the Jewish community in Corfu, Greece. In the past 7 years, he has facilitated many family reunions of MyHeritage users around the world.

Naama Lanski:

“The main pillar of my work as a family history researcher is trust.

People trust me with their stories and I do everything I can to make sure I will be completely worthy of that trust.

For me, this is a great privilege, and I pour all my heart, soul, and research skills (reinforced by our brilliant technology) into every single story I work on.”

Before joining MyHeritage, Naama worked as a journalist for 20 years, specializing in in-depth, investigative stories, profiles, and interviews. She also served as a research supervisor and lecturer at Tel Aviv University, and her Ph.D. research on social media platforms as arenas for impression management and social interactions — from a perspective combining gender and politics — is in its advanced stages.”

Naama is the mother of 3 children, one dog, and a fluctuating number of cats (8, as of this writing).

Elisabeth Zetland:

French-born Elisabeth Zetland earned her Ph.D. (with Honors) in medieval history from Paul Valéry University in Montpellier, France. Her ground-breaking original research traced the family trees of Jewish families residing in Florence, Italy in the 15th Century, and enabled Elisabeth to document an economic and social history of Tuscan Judaism between 1437 and 1464.

Elisabeth’s research talents and experience, as well as her passion for genealogy, made her a natural fit for MyHeritage, when she joined the company in 2011. In 2012 she became MyHeritage’s country manager for French-speaking markets, and since 2016 she has been a full-time member of the MyHeritage genealogy research team.

On her favorite type of workday, Elisabeth gets a name, finds enough evidence to build a large family tree from the name, and along the way discovers incredible stories, like she did recently for the hosts of Fox & Friends (a daily morning news and talk show on the Fox News Channel in the USA) and Good Morning Britain (an ITV breakfast program broadcast on weekdays in the UK).

She considers herself addicted to family history and totally devoted to the subject. In a few weeks, she will take her American husband to Moscow, Russia to meet his long-lost cousins — whom she found thanks to MyHeritage!