Time for more hand-wringing and worry? MyHeritage announces the acquisition of WorldVitalRecords. In fact the news announcemnt indicates that MyHeritage purchase all of FamilyLink.com. In past posts I have reviewed the ownership of the larger genealogy based companies. Just in the short time I have been involved in looking at the genealogy landscape, there have been some major acquisitions and consolidations. Ancestry.com purchased Genline.com and Footnote.com (now Fold3.com). Ancestry.com had previously purchased ProGenealogists.com. Now, MyHeritage.com, the huge online family tree company has made a move into the document side of the business.
MyHeritage.com is funded by Accel Partners. MyHeritage has purchased the following: Pearl Street Software, BackupMyTree.com; European family social network market leader OSN (Verwandt) GmbH; Dutch family network ZOOOF; British family network Kindo.com and Polish family network Bliscy.pl.
You might be interested to know that Accel Partners owns an interest in hundreds of companies, you might recognize the following: FaceBook, DropBox, Groupon, MacroMedia, RealNetworks, Spotify, StumbleUpon, Trulia, Veritas and many, many others.
What will happen to online records if they are considered to be nothing more than an asset of huge multinational corporations?
I need time to think about all this and do some more online research.
It is a worry. Once there was only the LDS, and now Multinational Corporations. And oftentimes these huge corps make huge mistakes.... from my experience.
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