Friday, October 18, 2013

FamilySearch/FindMyPast Announce Agreement

DC Thomson Family History and FamilySearch logosFamilySearch and FindMyPast owner, DC Thomson Family History, announced yesterday the family history strategic agreement du jour. More than 13 million records from FamilySearch.org launched yesterday on findmypast.com, including major collections of births, marriages and deaths covering America, Australia, and Ireland. Around 600 additional collections, containing millions of records, will follow.

“The convenience of searching many treasures from FamilySearch.org along with our own extensive collections will provide rich new insights for our customers,” said Annelies van den Belt, the new CEO of DC Thomson Family History. “This partnership with FamilySearch will accelerate the momentum of our next phase of global growth into new non-English-speaking markets.”

Unlike the MyHeritage announcement earlier this week, which explicitly identified the value each organization received, this announcement was vague on the value to be received by FamilySearch. The press release says the two will collaborate “to deliver a wide range of projects including digital preservation, records search, technological development and the means to allow family historians to share their discoveries.”

In recent weeks FamilySearch has entered into strategic agreements with Ancestry.com, MyHeritage, and DC Thompson Family History, giving each access to millions or billions of FamilySearch’s records. FamilySearch CEO, Dennis Brimhall, said that “expanding online access to historical records through this type of collaboration can help millions more people discover and share their family’s history.”

DC Thomson Family History was formerly known as BrightSolid Online Publishing and owns both Genes Reunited and the FindMyPast family of websites.

For more information on the DC Thompson Family History agreement, see the full press release. and frequently asked questions.

2 comments:

  1. I am very upset about the changes in familysearch.com! Now I will not have access to the same level of free information I had in the past. I am on a disability pension and cannot afford to pay findmypast.com

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  2. I see no point in consolidating all the genealogy sites. If familysearch is free, it doesn't need to be partnered with anyone. I presume IF we were on a paid site any document from familysearch would be free. I also presume any document we found on familysearch that belonged to a pay for view site will cost a membership at that site. With so many partnerships in the works, it will soon make little difference which site you have paid for because the documents you might need (if you could see enough information to be sure) will cost the price of a subscription on that site. I do not see this as a good thing. Who has enough money to pay for a subscription at a half a dozen or more sites? Not me.

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