It wasn’t that it was church-run, it was that the mormons sold their genealogical database to ancestry for a damn good, multimillion dollar deal in which (now this part is speculation, the previous part wasn’t) I assume they scraped ancestry’s technological knowhow to try to set up their own database better. I got to sit in on the meeting where Gordon Hinkley dropped his kindly old dude facade and scream at all the old volunteers running the genealogical department for the multibillion dollar church he personally owned to “delete the duplicates” I think was his exact wording he kept repeating. This was right before they were selling the database to ancestry. He was yelling at us to clean up the database he was selling, do it for free, because he needed more millions. One of my ancestors was in there 12 times (no fault of ours and we’d fought in vain with Salt Lake to get the duplicate entries removed, but since we’re from out of state they wouldn’t do shit). After that meeting, she had fifty duplicate entries.