Terms and Conditions

The Catholic Heritage Archive is owned and operated by Findmypast Limited. These are the terms and conditions (Terms), upon which Findmypast Limited (we, us and our) will allow you to access our database of historical records and materials (Records) through the website www.catholicheritagearchive.com and our associated mobile and tablet applications (Site).

Please read these Terms carefully before you start to use the Site. By using the Site, you indicate that you accept these terms of use and agree to be bound by them. We reserve the right to change these Terms from time to time by changing them on the Site, and by continuing to use the Site, you accept these changes and agree to be bound by them. It is your responsibility to check the Terms each time you use the Site.

Findmypast Limited is a limited liability company registered in England and Wales (Company number 4369607) having its registered office at The Glebe, 6 Chapel Place, Rivington Street, London, EC2A 3DQ. Our VAT registration number is 927 1672 12.

In addition, the following additional terms may apply to your use of the Site and are deemed incorporated into these terms:

our Privacy Policy

our Cookies Policy

These Terms contain the following sections:

Applicability of these terms and conditions
Obtaining access to and use of Records
Fair usage
Your personal information
Intellectual Property Rights
Content
Our right to amend Records
Liability
External links and banners
General
Contacting us

1. Applicability of these Terms

These Terms apply to all users of the Site. If you are a self-employed professional genealogist using the Site in your professional capacity (Genealogist), you may use the Site to carry out research for others subject to these Terms.

2. Obtaining access to and use of Records

You can see the Catholic Heritage Records held on the Site for free; however, to access and view Records you will need to register with the Site.

It is your responsibility to ensure your computer system meets any necessary technical and compatibility specifications to enable you to access and use the Site. It is also your responsibility to ensure that all persons who access the Site through your internet connection are aware of these terms and comply with them.

We may, from time to time, restrict access to certain features, parts, or content of the Site or the entire Site to users who have registered with us. You must ensure that any registration details you provide are accurate and up to date. If you choose, or you are provided with, a login ID (such as a username and password or other identifier) as part of our security procedures, you must treat such information as confidential and must not reveal it to anyone else. You are responsible for all activities that occur under your login ID and must notify us immediately of any unauthorised use or other security breach of which you become aware. By using the Site as a registered member, you accept on your own behalf and on behalf of the organisation (if any) named on your registration form to be bound by these Terms of Use and references to 'you' and 'your' refer to you individually and to your organisation. We reserve the right to disable any login ID, at any time, if in our opinion you have failed to comply with any of the provisions of these terms and conditions or if any detail you provide for the purposes of registering as a user proves to be false.

Aside from our advertisers who may display their advertisements in accordance with our terms and conditions of advertising on our Site, you may only use the Site for non-commercial and private professional use (as a self-employed, sole trading Genealogist) and only in accordance with these terms and conditions. You may retrieve and display content from the Site on a computer screen, print and copy individual pages and, subject to our terms, store such pages in electronic form. Additional terms may also apply to certain features, parts, or content of the Site and, where they apply, will be displayed before you access the relevant features, parts, or content.

Except to the extent expressly set out in these terms and conditions, you are not allowed to

store pages of the Site on a server or other storage device connected to a network or create an electronic database by (i) systematically downloading and storing all or any of the pages of the Site or (ii) by screen scraping, framing, caching, data extraction or programmatic access whether by robot, spider, or otherwise or (iii) by printing pages of the Site in a systematic or regular manner so as to create a database in hard copy form;
collect or harvest personally identifiable information from the Site;
remove or change any legal notices or other content of the Site or attempt to circumvent security or interfere with the proper working of the Site or the servers on which it is hosted;
use the Site to transmit, or procure the sending of, any unsolicited or unauthorised advertising or promotional material or any other form of similar solicitation (spam);
use the Site to knowingly transmit any data, send, or upload any material that contains viruses, trojan horses, worms, time-bombs, keystroke loggers, spyware, adware, or any other harmful programs or similar computer code designed to adversely affect the operation of any computer software or hardware;
attempt to gain unauthorised access to the Site, the server on which the Site is stored, or any server, computer, or database connected to our site or circumvent, disable, or otherwise interfere with our security-related features;
reproduce, copy, distribute, publicly display, or re-sell any part of the Site in contravention of these terms and conditions;
create links to the Site from any other website, without our prior written consent;
modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Site or parts of the Site or create derivative works from the Site;
use the Site for any business, commercial, or public purpose.

We reserve the right to withdraw any linking permission granted without notice. If you wish to make any use of material on our site other than that set out above, please address your request to [email protected]

You must only use the Site and anything available from the Site for lawful purposes (complying with all applicable laws and regulations), in a responsible manner, and not in a way that might damage our name or reputation or that of any of our group companies and affiliates.

All rights granted to you under these terms and conditions will terminate immediately in the event that you are in breach of any of them and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made in breach of these terms.

3. Fair usage

We may, at our sole discretion, restrict your access to the Records and/or Site following your, or your suspected, excessive use of the Records. By excessive use, we refer to an extraordinarily high number of Records views or an extraordinarily high number of Record downloads. If we deem your use as excessive we will contact you with a warning. If you have received a warning from us and continue to use the site excessively we may terminate your access to the Site.

4. Your personal information

When you register with the Site, you will need to provide us with certain personal data to enable us to allow access to the Site.

Our privacy policy sets out how we use any of your personal information you give us. Any personal data which you provide to us when you register with the Site must be true, accurate, current, and complete in all respects. You agree not to impersonate any other person or entity or to use a false name or a name that you are not authorised to use. You will notify us immediately of any changes to any personal information supplied to us.

5. Intellectual property rights

We are the owner or licensee of all intellectual property rights in any content of the Site (including text, graphics, software, photographs, and other images, videos, sound, trademarks, and logos).

Except as expressly set out here, nothing in these terms and conditions gives you any rights in respect of any intellectual property owned by us or our licensors and you acknowledge that you do not acquire any ownership rights in the Site or its content.

The Records on the Site are provided by third-party licensors (Licensors). In most instances the copyright or database rights owner is displayed as part of the Records. The Licensors shall retain all intellectual property rights in the Records. You cannot use the Records to create your own work such as databases, articles, blogs, or books, or copy or reproduce the Records (either in whole or in part), or publish them, for a purpose other than personal use, without our prior written permission (and/ or that of the Licensor of the Records).

Our status (and that of any identified contributors) as the authors of material on our site must always be acknowledged. If you wish to publish or otherwise professionally use the Records please contact us.

You must not modify the paper or digital copies of any material you have printed or downloaded in any way, and you must not use any illustrations, photographs, video, or audio sequences or any graphics separately from any accompanying text. In the event you print off, copy, or store pages from the Site (only as permitted by these terms and conditions), you must ensure that any copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right notices contained in the original content are reproduced.

If you believe that you own the copyright or any other intellectual property right in any of the Records on the Site and we have not recognized you as the copyright owner, please contact us and we will work with you to resolve this.

6. Content

We may change the format and content of the Site from time to time. You agree that your use of the Site is on an 'as is' and 'as available' basis and at your sole risk.

Whilst we try to make sure that all information contained on the Site is correct, it is not intended to amount to authority or advice on which reliance should be placed. You should check with us or the relevant information source before acting on any such information.

Except to the extent expressly set out in the additional terms and conditions mentioned at the top of these terms of use, we make or give no representation or warranty as to the accuracy, completeness, currency, correctness, reliability, integrity, quality, fitness for purpose, or originality of any content of the Site and, to the fullest extent permitted by law, all implied warranties, conditions, or other terms of any kind are hereby excluded. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we accept no liability for any loss or damage of any kind incurred as a result of you or anyone else using the Site or relying on any of its content. No liability can be accepted by us in respect of any changes made to the content of the Site by unauthorised third parties.

We cannot and do not guarantee that any content of the Site will be free from viruses and/or other code that may have contaminating or destructive elements and cannot accept any liability for the same. It is your responsibility to implement appropriate IT security safeguards (including anti&hyphen;virus and other security checks) to satisfy your particular requirements as to the safety and reliability of content.

7. Our right to amend Records

We reserve the right to make changes to the Records and services we offer on the Site without notice at any time. This includes the right to withdraw any Record offered on the Site. We may, for example, cease to provide Records from a particular data set at any time. We shall not be liable to anyone for withdrawing any Records from the Site.

8. Liability

Nothing in these Terms shall limit or exclude our liability to you for death or personal injury caused by our negligence or for fraudulent misrepresentation or any other liability that may not, under English law, be limited or excluded.

Subject to this, in no event shall we be liable to you (whether caused by tort or by breach of contract or otherwise) for loss of anticipated savings, data, wasted time, indirect or consequential losses, or for any loss of profit, revenue, contracts, goodwill, or other similar losses whether directly or indirectly incurred.

We cannot guarantee the uninterrupted or error-free operability of the Site. Access to the Site is permitted on a temporary basis and we reserve the right to withdraw, modify, or suspend the service we provide on the Site without notice. We will not be liable to you or any third party for any unavailability, modification, suspension, or withdrawal of the Site, or any features, parts, or content of the Site at any time for any period.

We shall not be obliged to perform our obligations under these Terms to the extent that we are prevented, hindered, or delayed in the event of 'Force Majeure' meaning an event beyond our control, which prevents us from complying with any of our obligations under this Terms, including but not limited to: act of God such as fires, explosions, earthquakes, drought, tidal waves and floods; war; hostilities; invasion; act of foreign enemies; rebellion; revolution; insurrection; military or usurped power; civil war; contamination by radioactivity from any nuclear fuel; riots; commotion; strikes; failure of transport links; failure of telecoms links; unavailability of the internet or any utility; go slows; lock outs or disorder, unless solely restricted to employees of the Site or of subcontractors; and acts or threats of terrorism.

We exclude any liability arising out of any dealings you have with third parties that take place using or facilitated by our website unless specifically agreed elsewhere in our terms of use.

You are responsible for and agree to pay us any losses, costs or expenses that we suffer as a result of you failing to comply with these terms of use.

Any software is downloaded at your own risk.

9. External links and banners

The Site may, from time to time, include links to external sites and banner advertising. We have included links to these sites to provide you with access to information and services that you may find useful or interesting, but we accept no responsibility for their content nor for their compliance with any laws and regulations. We have no control over the content of these sites or for anything provided by them and do not guarantee that they will be continuously available. We accept no responsibility for these sites or any loss or damage that may arise from your use of them. The fact that we include links to such external sites does not imply any endorsement of or association with their operators.

10. General

If any part or provision of these Terms is found to be unenforceable, this shall not affect the validity of any other part or provision.

You may not assign, sub-license, or otherwise transfer any of your rights under these Terms. We may assign these Terms or any rights hereunder without your consent or notice.

These Terms supersede any previous versions.

These Terms shall be governed by English law, and you agree that any dispute between us regarding them or the Site will only be dealt with by the English courts, provided that, if you are a consumer and not a business user and live in a part of the United Kingdom other than England, the applicable law of that part of the United Kingdom will govern and any dispute will only be dealt with by the courts there. Nothing shall prevent us from bringing proceedings to protect our intellectual property rights before any competent court.

11. Contacting us

Please submit any questions you have about these terms and conditions or any problems concerning the Site by email to customer support at [email protected].

Created: January 2019