Who Owns the Genealogy Companies -- More Websites

One of the "Big Four" online genealogically related commercial website companies is brightsolid.com, a company based in the United Kingdom. brightsolid is one of the major network services in the UK as well as a major player in the world-wide, online genealogical community. To quote from their website, "Our UK-based private and hybrid Clouds are host to over 2,000 organisations."

On the genealogical side of brightsolid's business, which they refer to as their "online publishing" business" is the online publishing and technology arm of publishing group DC Thomson, which also owns Friends Reunited.

• brightsolid boasts 18 million registered users across its family of online genealogy brands.
• It hosts over a billion genealogical records across its family of brands.

brightsolid has most recently expanded into the U.S. market with two major websites; a U.S. version of findmypast.com and the U.S. censusrecords.com.


Here is a list of their current websites:

• findmypast UK
• findmypast AU
• findmypast Ireland
• findmypast.com
• ScotlandsPeople
• BritishNewspaperArchive
• 1911 Census UK
• 1901 CensusOnline UK
• FriendsReunited
• AncestorsOnboard
• GenesReunited
• CensusRecords

brightsolid partners with record repositories for scanning, transcription and online publishing of their documents. Some of their partners include The National Archives of England and Wales, The British Library, many state, county and local record offices and family history societies internationally. Although this is basically a valuable service, efforts by brightsolid, as well as the other large commercial genealogical data websites, has created a "market" for records. By providing a revenue stream to the government or institution housing the records, in effect, the records become an asset and the governments and institutions will become less willing to put their records online for free.