Geneanet

Actually from the Family History Center in Salt Lake

 Geneanet, a company founded in France in 1996, was recently acquired by Ancestry. The agreement was announced in a press release of August 31, 2021. Originally Geneanet was called LPF, an acronym (in French) for list of surnames for France.  It will remain an independent company within Ancestry’s portfolio of companies that it owns. We all know about Ancestry with over 30 billion in over 80 countries, but who or what is Geneanet? To quote Ancestry:
“With a large and growing European community of more than 4 million members, Geneanet is available in ten languages and more than 25 countries. Combining Geneanet's free family tree platform and engaged community with Ancestry’s global subscriber base and unparalleled historical records will enable family history discoveries and connections for even more people around the world.”

To quote from Geneanet themselves:
“Geneanet is the largest community of genealogists involved in mutual aid and sharing in Continental Europe. It’s a website with almost 7 billion of data provided by members, collaborative projects, and partners.
The contributive side is about family trees and attached documents (family pictures, archival records, etc.). These are 1.3 million family trees and almost 1.4 billion individuals.
The collaborative side is about projects supported by Geneanet like pictures of graves and cemeteries all around the world (“Save our Graves”), indexes, and registers (parish, notarial, military, and other archives).”
In other words, Geneanet is a database search site similar to FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, Fold3, and all the others. Only, their information concentrates on France and much of the rest of Europe. It could be a valuable resource for anybody doing research on their ancestors in Europe, not only France where it started.
Of course, for many of us, cost is a definite factor. We only have so many dollars to spend on resources at a time. The beauty of this site is that basic access costs nothing more than registering with the site. In other words, free! A premium access package is available for $12.50 for 3 months. From what I’ve heard that would be of value for people with ancestors in France, itself, rather than other countries. This also gives you added features such as customization, alert tools, and printing from the website.
Besides searching the family trees available on the site, you can also enter information on your own trees or upload GEDcoms of those trees. This might be handy for people looking to store and make available their research on European families. A French researcher can be hired under “Ask An Expert” for $45 per request.
It has been noted by some that a lot of their free content is available also at FamilySearch and Internet Archives.
So how do you get to it? Their site is located at: geneanet.org, or of course, you can just google it.

There seems to be some advantages to this site although, it is a lot of family trees and information that can be found elsewhere. Of course, it is helpful to have stuff on one area or country all gathered together in one place to look through. I’m sure the value of the site will vary from person to person.

 I have not tried it out myself as I don’t have many French ancestors. I have a few Huguenots, and one who reportedly changed his name somewhere between France and here at about the time of The French Revolution. I should find the time at some point, to check them out on this site and see what more information I can find. I hope others who have more French ancestors and who are researching them more than I am mine, will check this site out and let us know a little more about it, especially now that Ancestry has acquired it as I’m sure it will start growing under they patronage.