MyHeritage is practically useless for Spanish-speaking surnames — don’t waste your money

If you’re researching Spanish-speaking family lines (specially in Spain, but possibly all of LatAm), save your money and skip MyHeritage. The platform simply does not understand how paternal and maternal surnames work in Spanish-language countries. Because the system assumes an Anglo surname structure, the “Smart Matches” and record suggestions become absurd — it mixes up paternal/maternal lines, treats second surnames as middle names, and produces completely inaccurate work. I paid a full year subscription (really expensive) and have not made any progress on my research.

After testing it extensively, I found free tools like FamilySearch far superior for Spanish surname research. They correctly handle two-surname conventions and allow you to manually search on digitalised records - MyHeritage only lets you use their search engine, which makes things worse.

I suspect the same problem applies to other non-English naming systems too. MyHeritage might work for US, UK, and other Anglo trees, but other systems are quite unattended.

Just sharing this so others don’t throw money at a subscription that won’t help with Spanish-speaking ancestry.