I don’t know if I’m just doing something wrong but I built my family tree and the website seems to have barely any information about my family at all. I found out more just checking out our national archives then what I found on this website. It’s maybe worth noting that I’m not in the US and it does appear to be somewhat US-centric.
The best it could find was a couple of enrollment records for voting and a single immigrant notification in an old newspaper. It didn’t find these either by itself, I had to manually go though the search system to find it. The OCR didn’t even get the spelling of the name correct.
I’m not sure what I expected but it was definitely better than this, especially for all the pay walls they throw up.
I’m not seeing any evidence that this was church-run at any point in time. Again, do you have a source for that claim?
Just because a business was founded by a member of a certain religion, that doesn’t mean the business is owned by the church. For example, many Catholics own businesses. Does that mean the pope or their local archdiocese controls those businesses?
I’m not trying to make this into a big argument, I’m just asking for your source that explains the church’s involvement. I do see that the owner made a deal with the church for discounted memberships, but any corporation could’ve struck a contract out in a similar fashion. Yes, the LDS church seems to have a weird interest in ancestry (thus the contract and the fact that one of their members made a business out of ancestry stuff)
It wasn’t that it was church-run, it was that the mormons sold their genealogical database to ancestry for a damn good, multimillion dollar deal in which (now this part is speculation, the previous part wasn’t) I assume they scraped ancestry’s technological knowhow to try to set up their own database better. I got to sit in on the meeting where Gordon Hinkley dropped his kindly old dude facade and scream at all the old volunteers running the genealogical department for the multibillion dollar church he personally owned to “delete the duplicates” I think was his exact wording he kept repeating. This was right before they were selling the database to ancestry. He was yelling at us to clean up the database he was selling, do it for free, because he needed more millions. One of my ancestors was in there 12 times (no fault of ours and we’d fought in vain with Salt Lake to get the duplicate entries removed, but since we’re from out of state they wouldn’t do shit). After that meeting, she had fifty duplicate entries.
Owned not run. The LDS has never run Ancestry directly. The service LDS runs is a competing free service.
I can find multiple sources that state a 30% stake at certain points but I can’t say I trust them as they are blogs. I’ll keep looking.
As an aside LDS and HRCC are very different in terms of how they view money and investment.