01 September 2007

Loud and Clear: Ancestry heard us

Just in case, you haven't seen Ancestry's 24/7 Family History Circle blog, there's a message from the company about the concerns and objections of the genea-blogging community over the Internet Biographical Collection. Bloggers had also questioned the time frame of the database's removal as the phrase previously used was "for the time being."

In the current posting, both concerns were addressed - I've highlighted sentences below:

Hi, my name is Kendall Hulet, and I’m a product manager at Ancestry.com. I’ve probably met a lot of you at FGS, NGS, and other conferences. If not, I look forward to meeting you in the future.

I wanted to write you a note because I’m extremely concerned about the frustrations that the recently-removed Internet Biographical Collection has caused. We had hoped to provide a way for you to be able to search the entire web easily for genealogically-relevant pages and provide for preservation of sources for future generations. In looking back, we understand why members of the community are upset. We’ve heard you loud and clear, and we’ve removed this product with no intention of re-releasing it. Instead, it is my hope that someday we’ll be able to provide a free web search engine that links directly back to the live web pages, and can become a useful tool to the genealogical community. If we do move forward with this type of initiative, we will seek your input and talk more with community leaders to make sure we get it right.

Kendall Hulet

Good news!

2 comments:

  1. Schelly,

    Nice post :)

    On an amusing note, I was amazed through all of this to see the occasional post from the folks who wanted to be included in that database. Strangely they always posted with an alias and no link to their blog or web site. Just made me curious.

    Janice

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  2. Thanks, Janice.

    Are we curious or just suspicious? :-)

    I guess that as genealogists, genea-historians or whatever we call ourselves this goes with the territory.

    We know we're always curious - otherwise we'd be spending our hours doing something else - and until something is proven, we tend to be suspicious!

    Schelly

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