Misery Loves Company Corner: There's recently been a bit of buzz
on the
State Coordinators' list and the USGENWEB-ALL list about Kindred
Konnections, another fee-based online genealogy provider. Kindred
Konnections is unique in that it has a program whereby users can get free
subscription time in exchange for transcribing records [I tried this once;
they sent me a scan of about 25 entries from a census which I took about
10 minutes to transcribe and which earned me an hour of free time in their
databases. Not a bad deal.] It turns out they aren't so unique in their
approach to linking to online data that other people provide for free.
Like
FamilyDiscovery.com, Kindred Konnections is also linking to free
genealogy data sources such as USGenWeb page, RW's user pages, etc., and
charging people to see them. They are also displaying the page in frames
so the home URL is not apparent to the viewer. Give it a try: go to
http://www.kindredkonnections.com and put the name James Janda in the
search boxes. Then click on the "Ancestral Archives Index" to pull up the
four hits you should have gotten. You will see that none of the hits are
actually in KK's database but are housed at such places as Root$web's user
home pages and Gendex. If you click on any of these links you go to a
subscription page.
This is how KK apparently justifies saying it has "over 1 billion names"
available for searching. We admit to being very perplexed by this state
of affairs. In our experience, Kindred Konnections is fairly well
respected although they are a relatively small-time player in the
online genealogy field. Their "free for transcribing program" idea is
great and is still, so far as I know, unique. Yet they obviously feel
that what they are doing is somehow OK. It may not be illegal, but it
is definitely not the way to win friends among the online genealogy
crowd and the bad publicity it engenders should alone be enough to
discourage it. But they persist not only in doing it, but in justifying
their personal profit off of other people's hard work by saying "our
subscription fees are only for access to the services that make this
information easily available." ["Cindy", feedback(a)kindredkonnections.com]
At least one very upset USGW member has publicly threatened to sue
them for including her GEDCOM in their search and charging for access to
it. She and others are also busy moving their pages so that KK's index
points to dead links.