The Drouin Institute has moved its free online collection of about two million Canadian obituaries, from 1999 to present, to the subscription side of its Genealogy Quebec website. Gone are the days when the public could freely access the database of obituaries that had been published online by newspapers and funeral homes.
Genealogy Quebec’s 1999-present obituaries are now part of a larger section, called Obituaries (1860-2019).
The Obituaries (1860-2019) section is composed of four sub-sections: the formerly free Internet obituaries; Newspaper obituaries, which is an odd collection of images of newspaper clippings, primarily from Quebec and Ontario, along with other parts of Canada and the United States; Death cards; and Tombstones.
Not having done so in the past, I took at look at Newspaper obituaries. A search for Dever resulted in two obituaries with photos. A search for Young revealed 195 obituaries and memorials, some with photos. A number of my Young relatives died in Montreal, but I could only find one memorial. While it is indicated this collection goes back to 1860, I only saw clippings from the 1980s, 1990s, and 21st century. No explanation is provided to explain how this collection was amassed or by whom.
Court ruling
So, why did the Drouin Institute move the internet obits from free to subscription? There are a couple of possibilities.
Last year, two relatively new websites, Everhere and Afterlife, which were owned by the same person, had taken online obituaries, and then modified and published them without permission, all with the purpose of encouraging people to buy flowers.
On April 30, Justice Catherine Kane ordered one of the websites, Afterlife Network Inc., to pay $20 million in damages to grieving families and issued an injunction against the website to prevent it from operating in the future.
The Ottawa judge said the site had infringed on copyrights by lifting the obituaries and photos of the deceased from other websites.
Did this ruling prompt the Drouin Institute to put its obituary collection behind the subscription wall? Were there concerns about privacy issues? Did they simply want to encourage more people to subscribe? Or all of the above?
Affordable daily subscription rate
Fortunately, all is not lost for penny-pinching genealogists.
Subscriptions to the bilingual Genealogy Quebec website are not expensive. One day is $5 and one month is $13. A one-year subscription is $100. As I written before, I have friends who spend more than $5 for a coffee. My close friends spend more than $13 on wine for lunch or dinner. So, you decide how much to spend, or not.
