Tangled Web.

Nobody in this part of the world could possibly have missed the news about the sale of Friends Reunited today. ITV have sold their social networking site to the Dundee based newspaper company, DC Thomson. Notable titles include Dundee Courier, the Sunday Post and The People's Friend although those of you living outside Scotland may be more familiar with the Dandy and the Beano. These comics were a childhood favourite for many people and in fact, we liked them so much that we named our dogs after them when we moved to Dundee!

If you are anything like me though, you will be wondering why such a conservative, parochial newspaper group would be interested in a website like FR. Well, I can't say that I'm sure myself, but the company seems to be trying to consolidate it's interests in the family history market.

Anyone familiar with Scottish family history research will know that Ancestry.com, one of the biggest family history websites, does not have the rights to the digital records held by either the National Archives of Scotland or the General Record Office of Scotland. Instead these are marketed through the scotlandspeople.gov.uk website which is managed by Brightsolid, the same subsidiary of DC Thomson that just purchased Friends Reunited. Brightsolid also own one findmypast.com, a rival to ancestry and the acquisition of FR will allow them to expand their market by expanding the genes reunited part of the site.

Now, if I've lost you at this point, that's probably because I'm a bit lost myself. So many different companies, so many different websites and so many different ways you are going to have to fork out cash if you want to do family history research. Information may be becoming more available these days, but it is doing so at a price. More worryingly, it seems unlikely that the war between Ancestry and the NAS / GROS will end any time soon.