Meet the MyHeritage Research Team

Meet the MyHeritage Research Team

Updated November 2024

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:

Naama

“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.”

A few of the many stories Naama has worked on include that of an orphaned Holocaust survivor who discovered biological relatives for the first time ever at age 83; a reunion between 3 siblings across the Atlantic who never knew about each other before; and the opportunity to personally reveal to Hollywood star Helen Mirren that she has a family link to Queen Elizabeth II and Golda Meir, whom the actress portrayed in recent films.

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 is close to submitting her Ph.D. dissertation on social media platforms as arenas for impression management and social interactions.

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, married with 2 daughters, 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 receives 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 also particularly enjoys diving into old newspapers and dusting off the past, as she did during the COVID outbreak when she studied how people protected themselves from the Spanish flu in 1918. More recently, she examined the American branch of the Bonaparte family through newspapers and the MyHeritage archives.

She considers herself addicted to family history and totally devoted to the subject. A few years ago, she took her American husband to Moscow, Russia to meet his long-lost cousins — whom she found thanks to MyHeritage!

Comments

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  • Joy Shivar

    March 14, 2018

    Very nice to meet you this way and looking forward to working with you and Rafi on the artifact project!

  • Bill Holley

    March 21, 2018

    Hello Team:

    Roi, I came to this page to check out MyHeritage. I read the Corfu and Me and was moved to joyful tears as I read it. I was able to see the founder Gilad Japhet as a very good person and am feeling confident about adding my family details to my page here at MyHeritage. Thank you,

    Bill

  • Helen

    January 15, 2019

    I am Helen Ruth (Brown) maiden name married a Mack and i am very interested in finding my mothers family history in which her maiden name was Robinson. the father was Mack Robinson and the wife was Alice Porter Robinson.

  • Jeanie Gearhart

    April 29, 2020

    Hi Nitay, very nice to put a face to the person researching our family history.
    Thank you I. Advance.

  • WM

    Will Mann

    November 15, 2023

    Elisabeth Zetland, your excellent account — “The Lesser Known Story of Napoleon’s American Legacy” leaves me wanting more. Please include his older brother Joseph Bonaparte in an expanded version. Joseph Napoleon Bonaparte (1768-1844), the Former King of Naples and Spain, emigrated to America in 1815 and built Point Breeze, in New Jersey. He lived in the US until 1839. He also produced several offspring who remained in America.