Monday, June 23, 2014

FindMyPast Acquires Mocavo, Mocavo Provides Free U.S. Census Indexes

The BIG news this morning is that FindMyPast (part of DC Thomson Family History with U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland and Australia/New Zealand records) has acquired Mocavo, a genealogy search engine, family tree and record provider in the United States.

You can read the press release at http://www.geneapress.com/2014/06/findmypast-buys-mocavo.html.


The Mocavo Genealogy blog post by Mocavo founder Cliff Shaw is at  http://blog.mocavo.com/2014/06/new-chapter.  The post highlights the announcement, plus provides a link to the U.S. census record indexes that are FREE (and Cliff says they always will be).

The link to search all of the census records is http://www.mocavo.com/1790-1940-United-States-Census/126199, and you can select a specific census from that page.





At this time, there are no links to U.S. census record images from the indexed information.  Hopefully, there will be, since FindMyPast has all of the U.S. census images available on their www.findmypast.com website (for a subscription, of course).

I have no inside information about this acquisition or the reasons for it, but I can speculate about the benefits to each party:

1)  Mocavo gains a financial and technology partner for their digitizing and technology efforts, and probably gains access to more United States record indexes and images from FindMyPast.

2)  FindMyPast gains access to more United States record indexes and images from Mocavo collections, plus the Mocavo genealogy search engine, and the technologies being developed by Mocavo (e.g., handwriting transcriptions, online transcription, search hints, push notifications, and more).

In the press release, the principals describe the motivation for the acquisition:

Cliff Shaw, founder and CEO of Mocavo, said: “We are thrilled to join forces with Findmypast and become a part of their family of leading brands. The combination of our companies will provide family history enthusiasts with unprecedented access to the stories of their ancestors. Expect Mocavo to grow stronger with Findmypast’s support and to continue to drive innovation in the family history category.”

Joshua Taylor, newly appointed Director of Family History, Findmypast, said: “Our heritage and rich record collections coupled with Mocavo’s sophisticated technology will make for a powerful combination enabling us to offer our customers even more ways to unlock the fascinating stories within their family history.”


The genealogy industry has coalesced around the four major "players" - Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage and FindMyPast/Mocavo.  Who knows what the future holds.

The exciting thing for genealogy enthusiasts is that this competition in the industry brings many good things to all of us - records, technologies, collaboration, etc.  

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/06/findmypast-acquires-mocavo-mocavo.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver


2 comments:

Linda Herrick Swisher said...

With PERSI already at findmypast, I wonder if the Mocavo search engine will facilitate searches in this database?

Jen Baldwin said...

Linda,
Great question. At this time, the two services will remain separate. Findmypast has always operated a family of complementary brands, aimed at different segments of the genealogy and history market. Mocavo fits alongside Findmypast, home of the new PERSI, Genes Reunited, British Newspaper Archive,Lives of the First World War and our other sites, each delivering a distinctive customer experience. We remain committed to adding further images to PERSI, such as our most recent release on Friday of last week. You can find all of the updates to PERSI here: http://bit.ly/1lM01Vo
~ Jen Baldwin, Outreach Manager US/Canada, Findmypast