LDS Church – Ancestry.com

In case you missed it, the LDS Church in early 2007 made the determination not to continue paying large sums of money for Ancestry.com database access in their libraries.

They moved to a program of partnering with libraries worldwide and are in the process of making more available in their libraries, family history centers, and on their site.

Since they had lost access to all the digitized census images and indexes of Ancestry.com they moved agressively to mobilizing an army of volunteers to index the censuses on their own. This is the Family Search Labs projects.

More and more records including censuses are coming online.

Now in the last month, an agreement with Ancestry.com for the top 13 regionals centers and the main library with Ancestry.com to use the records, but no current committment for roughly 4,000 other centers.

Smells like Ancestry.com realized they were missing out on not just some money from the Church but all the referrals from people who use it in the libraries then buy it themselves. For the church its a stopgap that helps at least some while they do without and create their own.

Stay tuned for future agreements if they really happen.
From the inside – James.