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This particular website happens to be owned by Ancestry.com. But so is Fold3.com and various other websites. The site currently claims to have 5,592,247,475 "profiles in family trees." I am not sure what that means exactly, but if that number is supposed to be the total number of names of individuals in the Mundia.com family tree or trees, then it puts this website way ahead in numbers of even Ancestry.com's Public Member Family Trees or even MyHeritage.com in absolute numbers. For example, when I looked at Ancestry.com today, I found the number of records in Public Member Family Trees to be 2,147,483,647.
Mundia.com describes itself as follows:
Mundia lets people everywhere create, discover and share their family history in an easy and fun way.
With Mundia, you can:
- Build your family tree. Then grow it by sharing and collaborating with others.
- Receive hints about matching ancestors and relatives in other members' trees.
- Contact other members and find unknown living relatives.
Basic membership to Mundia is free.
- Keep up to date with your family through comments, stories, and photos posted within your family circle.
Mundia is the new family history site from Ancestry.com, the leader in online family history and the world's largest online family tree network.Mundia is a truly global platform offering access to more than 13 million family trees from all parts of the world with more than 1.4 billion profiles. Mundia is available in multiple languages.
Discover your family.It is interesting in looking at the Mundia.com blog, the last post was 17 May 2011. So what or who is this website that appears to be abandoned except for racking up huge numbers? Here is an explanation from the website:
- Who operates the Mundia website?
- Mundia has been developed by the creators of the leading family history website Ancestry.com and its global network of sites (which include Ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.ca, Ancestry.com.au and other sites, together the “Ancestry Websites”). By registering for Mundia, you become part of the Ancestry community. The company that operates the Mundia website is based in the United States and is known as Ancestry.com Operations Inc.
- Are you phasing out Ancestry.com or any other Ancestry Websites?
- No, we are not. The Ancestry Websites will continue to be the leading resource for family history records on the Internet. Mundia is complementary to the Ancestry Websites.
OK, so here is the key. This is the statement that explains what this site is and how it operates:
Mundia is connected to the Ancestry Websites and part of the Ancestry community. All of the public family trees throughout the Ancestry Websites are visible on Mundia.So why do some websites become well known and others never seem to leave the background of the Web? Why is Mundia.com still online?
It seems obvious to me that Ancestry is positioning this site to make Ancestry.com a tiered priced subscriber only site and leave the "free" part to Mundia.
ReplyDeleteWell, Mundia.com is sitting there in Beta without any advertising. That would be an interesting way to position the site. Thanks for the comment.
DeleteI ignore Mundia because it is just public trees off ancestry which are, far too often, garbage. I don't even mention it to folks starting out in genealogy, I feel I would be sending them down the wrong path.
DeleteWhat is worrying is that the information contained in the family trees seems to be offered by ancestry on it subscription sites as if it has some sort of assured authenticity . As the previous person commented this is not the case and a lot of the information contained in these trees has no basis in reality . There is much chaff amongst the grain
ReplyDeletepeople should be aware of this.
There are constant technical errors/issues making Mundia almost unusable anyway. It's so frustrating. The same issues have been reported for months and months with no response from Mundia at all, take a look at Mundia's facebook group, lots of issues- no support. Not a great advertisement for Ancestry.
ReplyDeleteAs of September 2014 the Beta version of Mundia will merge with the paid Ancestry website. Can anyone enlighten me with more information as to what will happen to my family tree when this happens.
ReplyDeleteIt has been a strategic ploy by companies such as 'Ancestry.com' to gather up researchers hard won research materials or family records/photos and the like under the guise of 'Free' access, then sell it to others via a paid membership. In the early days, Ancestry would give free access to their records for a researchers gedcom upload to their site, some are still doing this. Additionally they scan other sites and gather family information for their own, I have seen materials they have 'lifted' off my family sites, but would have to pay a subscription for full access to it. sneaky plagiarists and thieves..!
ReplyDeleteI found away into my tree through a back door on the Ancestry website so to speak and I think I will start to delete my family tree. I'm not going to let them profit from my hard work that has taken years to build up.
ReplyDelete