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You may or may not have noticed but FamilySearch.org has a new partner listed on each individual's detail page; Geneanet.org. Who is this newcomer to the list of websites that can be automatically searched from the FamilySearch.org Family Tree? Here is a brief explanation from their website:
Launched in 1996 by genealogy enthusiasts, Geneanet is a community of more than 3 million members who share their genealogical information for free: more than 6 billion individuals in the family trees, some digitized archival records, some family pictures, some indexes, all available through a powerful search engine, and a blog.
The Premium subscription offers additional options, including an advanced search engine, and to access hundreds of million of indexes provided by our partners.
The Geneanet team is passionate about genealogy and emerging technologies. And at Geneanet, genealogy is almost a family affair as several team members have common ancestors!Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have a free subscription to the website because of the FamilySearch partnership agreement.
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| https://partners.familysearch.org/solutionsgallery/s/gallery-profile/a2Rf10000079nuHEAQ/00063 |
The link for logging on with your LDS Account is available on the Solutions Gallery at the bottom of the pages on the FamilySearch.org website. Members qualify for the Geneanet Premium Subscription.
Geneanet.org has a huge searchable collection of French and other European records called the Genealogy Library containing over 3 billion indexed individuals in old books, academic journals, newspapers, obituaries, and hundreds of thousands of documents. You can search for the names of your ancestors. These resources come from all over the world from places you may never have seen documents previously. Here is a search of just the newspapers and magazine titles.
Here is a part of the list of collections:
The website is particularly helpful in searching for French ancestors.
The website has a lot of other projects and resources and is certainly worth investigating. You can also put a family tree up on the website and receive record hints from the website.
I note you a retired lawyer. If a country has a law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion or lack of, would you think it would be legal for Geneanet (and Ancestry, MyHeritage etc) to hand out free subscriptions to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and not offer something similar to other people?
ReplyDeleteYour question makes some invalid assumptions. First of all, I would have to know the exact contents of any religious discrimination law. Secondly, the subscriptions to the various websites are not "handed out." They are part of the compensation being paid pursuant to contracts between the other genealogy companies and FamilySearch. If you have a lot of genealogy records to sell to the large genealogy companies, then you could very well allocate part of the compensation received for a "free" website access. The word free does not mean that the subscriptions were not paid for, it just means that FamilySearch negotiated the cost as part of the contracts. There is no discrimination, FamilySearch paid so the members do not have to pay.
DeleteThe particular law I am thinking of is that in my home country, which states that the following are "prohibited grounds of discrimination:
ReplyDelete(c) religious belief:
(d) ethical belief, which means the lack of a religious belief, whether in respect of a particular religion or religions or all religions:
"The provision of goods and services" is subject to those grounds of discrimination.
Now I would think there was no legal or moral problem with a club or group of people making a deal with a company like Geneanet to the effect that they would pay a lump sum annually instead of each individually having to renew their subscriptions. BFamilySearch giving records to other companies does not "cost" individual members of the Church anything, so members get free or subsidized subscriptions without having to pay or sacrifice anything. Now paying on behalf of someone else might be fine, but what I think is questionable is that they "pay" on behalf only of members and not anyone else.
Once again you are making uninformed and false assumptions. You are assuming that the various members of the religion do not pay for the church and that somehow churches can give their members free services. This is a false assumption. Churches rely on the donations of their members. The members get nothing for free. In the case of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the active members of the church pay an annual tithing of ten percent of their increase. So, if you want to have free access to the partner websites, all you have to do is join the church and pay ten percent of your income. A very substantial part of that donated income will them be used to acquire records around the world and those records can then be traded for a rather small benefit of having free access to a few websites or you could do as I did and spend a year of my life voluntarily working all day five days a week digitizing records for FamilySearch (a wholly owned subsidiary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) so that those digitized records could be put online for free by FamilySeach so that you who are not a member of the Church could view all those records for free. In exchange, I get free access to a few websites including FamilySearch.org which is free anyway. Would you like to spend a year volunteering for free for FamilySearch? You can do so anytime you like. Check for a volunteer link on the startup page of the FamilySearch.org website. When I was working full-time as an attorney, i was billing my time at hundreds of dollars an hour. What was the value of my one-year contribution to FamilySearch and the Church? So what are you going to give to the Church for that free membership and a few subscriptions to some online genealogy websites? Another question for you. How much does it cost the genealogy websites to give one person a "free" subscription. As a blog writer, I get offers of "free" subscriptions all the time. If a company has millions of subscribers, what does it cost to give away a few "free" subscriptions?
DeleteOh, I forgot to mention. You do have free access to all these programs. Your whole assumption is wrong. They are all free to everyone in over 5000 Family History Centers worldwide. So, find your nearest Family History Center and get busy using all of the Partner Programs for free.
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