Sunday, January 20, 2008

Scotland Online Buys Findmypast

Scotland Online Buys Family History Website (from The Herald ): "Scotland Online, the IT business owned by Dundee media dynasty DC Thomson, yesterday said it had acquired findmypast.com, a leading independent UK-based family history website.

The company said it had acquired the business Title Research Group as part of its plans to establish a world-class online network of family history resources, but it did not disclose the sale price.

The merger will see Scotland Online's current online genealogy service, ScotlandsPeople, amalgamating with findmypast.com to create an enlarged resource to serve millions of family history enthusiasts worldwide.
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The company said the merger 'will enable a wider audience to access the most complete suite of family history records available online in the UK'.

Scotland Online recently won the tender for the 1911 England and Wales census records, which will be available during 2009.

Chris van der Kuyl, chief executive of Scotland Online, said: 'We are delighted to welcome the findmypast team to Scotland Online and look forward to working very closely with them on building a wonderful family history resource.

'Family history enthusiasts the world over will benefit.'

Findmypast.com established itself as an innovative genealogical service that has become one of the leading destination websites for family history researchers.

It was the first company in the world to put the complete birth, marriage and death indexes for England and Wales online, later adding its census and unique passenger-list records."

DearMYRTLE: Scotlands People & FindMyPast to merge: "FindMyPast has extensive United Kingdom records in index and scanned image format including complete birth, marriage & death indexes; census; passenger lists; family trees, the National Burial Index; civil service evidence of age 1752-1948; GRW shareholders 1835-1910, a variety of military records.

The Scotland’s People website is the result of a partnership between General Register Office for Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland and the Court of the Lord Lyon enabled by Scotland Online. Offerings include indexes and scanned images of old parish registers (1553-1854), census, wills & testaments in addition to birth, marriage & death records.

Both sites are considered among the top tier genealogy research sites for their localities, and are “pay per view” membership sites.

It would seem the consolidation of efforts should save money on site development and maintenance, freeing up dollars to digitizing records. This may provide Ancestry.uk.com et al with healthier competition. Hopefully this will translate to keeping costs down for subscribers of all services."

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