bagsOver the past few years, the genealogy world has seen a number of buyouts, as well as partnerships, and the past few weeks have seen two more. The latest buyouts both involve findmypast who just seem to keep going from strength to strength.

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that findmypast had bought out Origins.net. Having started in 1997, Origins.net were one of the early pioneers of online records, and the first company to set up a pay-as you-go for online family history records. Specialising in unusual and often hard to find British and Irish records, its many early records include rare marriage indexes, apprentices and poor law records, together with the National Wills Index, and currently has which 156 millions British and Irish records online.

Their wills index when combined with collections currently on findmypast and more in development, will provide the largest online resource for UK wills and probate material. Origins will become a wholly owned subsidiary of findmypast and the extensive record sets from Origins will be brought into findmypast over the next few months, and the Origins website will continue to run as usual.

For more on this announcement, click here.

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And shortly after that it was announced that findmypast had purchased Mocavo. Founded by Cliff Shaw, Mocavo launched on in March 2011, and in June 2011, Family Tree Magazine named Mocavo as one of the best 101 genealogy websites of 2011.

A blog post I wrote on it back in 2012 which you can read here, and says that “Mocavo is the world’s first and largest genealogy search engine.” Google certainly indexes a lot, and it tends to be the only search engine many people use. But there are others available, and using them will often turn up different results. Mocavo was created to index only genealogy web sites and does so with extra software tools not available in the other search engines. As a result, it is very effective at finding historical information about people. From this as a start, the company then moved into digitisation, having acquired the ReadyMicro company, and moved into online tress as well.

Cliff Shaw says “The next few months are going to be incredibly exciting as we bring together two companies with enormous resources, content, and technology to bring you more of what you love. Nothing on either site will be going away – just getting better (and quickly!)”.

You can read his full post about it here, and the announcement from findmypast here.

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So stay tuned for exciting times not just with findmypast, Origins and Mocavo, but in the genealogy industry in general. It seems that the industry has hit the Fast Forward button, as so many records are appearing at such a rapid rate. Never before have genealogists had so much at their fingertips.

Happy researching.

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