I told you so! Mergers, Acquisitions and Partnerships

At the current Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, there is more going on that just the presentations and exhibitors. In a blog post news release from the Conference findmypast.com announced a partnership with the Federation of Genealogical Societies. The announcement says in part:

Findmypast.com, an international leader in online family history research, today announced a national partnership with Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) to preserve, digitize and provide access to local records from genealogical societies across the country.

The announcement further says:

“As we aggressively grow our business in the U.S., we are looking to form partnerships that benefit both the genealogical community and findmypast.com,” said Chris van der Kuyl, CEO of brightsolid, the parent company for findmypast. “This partnership will benefit our customers by giving them access to records that can’t be found anywhere else and participating societies will receive royalties for record images viewed.”

In one of my recent posts, I noted that the large genealogical database companies (LGDC) are not really in competition with one another. But that does not mean that they are not aggressively expanding and trying to grow their revenue stream. The value in these companies is the impression of users and potential users that they have unique records that will assist in the user's genealogical research. Anytime one of these companies can significantly expand their holdings, they will begin to attract more customers. Ancestry.com did this recently by acquiring Archives.com and adding millions of records as did MyHeritage.com when they announced a new partnership with 1000memories, the creators of ShoeBox, a free mobile app for iOS and Android.

I can safely predict that we will see further such announcements in the coming months.