Ancestry.com

Infobases, Inc.

In 1990, Paul B. Allen and Dan Taggart, two Brigham Young University graduates, founded Infobases and began offering Latter-day Saints (LDS) publications on floppy disks. In 1988, Allen had worked at Folio Corporation, founded by his brother Curt and his brother-in-law Brad Pelo. Infobases chose to use the Folio infobase technology, which Allen was familiar with, as the basis for their products.

Infobases' first products were floppy disks and compact disks sold from the back seat of the founders' car. In 1994, Infobases was named among Inc. magazine's 500 fastest-growing companies. Their first offering on CD was the LDS Collectors Edition, released in April 1995, selling for $299.95, which was offered in an online version in August 1995. Ancestry officially went online with the launched Ancestry.com in 1996.

Ancestry.com

With its roots as a genealogy newsletter started in 1983 by John Sittner, and became an established publishing company in 1984. Ancestry was relaunched as a magazine in January 1994, and went online in 1996. On January 1, 1997, Infobases' parent company, Western Standard Publishing, purchased Ancestry, Inc., publisher of Ancestry magazine and genealogy books. Western Standard Publishing's CEO was Joe Cannon, one of the principal owners of Geneva Steel.

In July 1997, Allen and Taggart purchased Western Standard's interest in Ancestry, Inc. At the time, Brad Pelo was president and CEO of Infobases, and president of Western Standard. Less than six months earlier, he had been president of Folio Corporation, whose digital technology Infobases was using. In March 1997, Folio was sold to Open Market for $45 million. The first public evidence of the change in ownership of Ancestry Magazine came with the July/August 1997 issue, which showed a newly reorganized Ancestry, Inc., as its publisher. That issue's masthead also included the first use of the Ancestry.com web address.

More growth for Infobases occurred in July 1997, when Ancestry, Inc. purchased Bookcraft, Inc., a publisher of books written by leaders and officers of the LDS Church. Infobases had published many of Bookcraft's books as part of its LDS Collector's Library. Pelo also announced that Ancestry's product line would be greatly expanded in both CDs and online. Alan Ashton, a longtime investor in Infobases and founder of WordPerfect, was its chairman of the board.

Allen and Taggart began running Ancestry, Inc. independently from Infobases in July 1997, and began creating one of the largest online subscription-based genealogy database services.

In April 1999, to better focus on its Ancestry.com and MyFamily.com Internet businesses, Infobases sold the Bookcraft brand name and its catalog of print books to its major competitor in the LDS book market, Deseret Book. Included in the sale were the rights to Infobases' LDS Collectors Library on CD. A year earlier, Deseret Book had released a competing product called GospeLink, and the two products were combined as a single product by Deseret Book.

The MyFamily.com website launched in December 1998, with additional free sites beginning in March 1999. The site generated one million registered users within its first 140 days. The company raised more than US$90 million in venture capital from investors and changed its name on November 17, 1999 from Ancestry.com, Inc. to MyFamily.com, Inc. Its three Internet genaealogy sites were then called Ancestry.com, FamilyHistory.com, and MyFamily.com. Sales were about US$62 million for 2002 and US$99 million for 2003.

In March 2004, the company, which had outgrown its call center in Orem, Utah, opened a new call center, which accommodates about 700 agents at a time, in Provo. Heritage Makers was acquired by MyFamily.com in September 2005, and sold a year later in August 2006. The Ancestry.ca website was opened on 24 January 2006. In March 2006, MyFamily opened a new office in Bellevue, Washington, as part of the MyFamily business unit. Encounter Technologies was acquired in April 2006.

By 2006, the Ancestry.com database contained information on 500 million people, information from every U.S. census record from 1790 to 1930. On December 19, 2006, the company changed its name to "The Generations Network." While the company had been offering free access to Ancestry.com at LDS Family History Centers, that service was terminated on 17 March 2007, because TGN and the LDS Church were unable to reach a mutually agreeable licensing agreement. In 2010, Ancestry restored access to its site at Family History Centers.

On July 6, 2009, the company changed its name to "Ancestry.com".

In 2010, Ancestry sold its book publishing assets to Turner Publishing Company. In the same year, Ancestry.com discontinued the publication of Ancestry Magazine, after 25 years of publication, and Genealogical Computing.

Ancestry.com became a publicly traded company on NASDAQ (symbol: ACOM) on November 5, 2009, with an initial public offering of 7.4 million shares priced at $13.50 per share, underwritten by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Jefferies & Company, Piper Jaffray, and BMO Capital Markets.

Ancestry.com continued its partnership with NBC for the Who Do You Think You Are? television series in 2011. The television show went into its fourth season in 2016.

In 2010, Ancestry.com expanded its domestic operations with the opening of an office in San Francisco, California, staffed with brand new engineering, product, and marketing teams geared toward developing some of Ancestry's cutting-edge technology and services. In 2011, Ancestry launched an Android and iOS app.

In December 2011, Ancestry.com moved the Social Security Death Index search behind a paywall and stopped displaying the Social Security information of people who had died within the past 10 years, because of identity theft concerns.

In March 2012, Ancestry.com acquired the collection of DNA assets from GeneTree.

In September 2012, Ancestry.com expanded its international operations with the opening of its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. The Dublin office includes a new call centre for international customers, as well as product, marketing, and engineering teams.

In October 2012, Ancestry.com agreed to be acquired by a private equity group consisting of Permira Advisers LLP, members of Ancestry.com's management team, including CEO Tim Sullivan and CFO Howard Hochhauser, and Spectrum Equity, for $32 per share or around $1.6 billion. At the same time, Ancestry.com purchased a photo digitization and sharing service called 1000Memories.

In September 2013, Ancestry.com announced its acquisition of Find a Grave. A month later, the company announced it had purchased the family history records of the South African genealogy website Ancestry24, which ceased operating in February 2013.

Products and services

Ancestry.com is a subscription-based genealogy research website and DNA product with over 16 billion records online. The majority of records are from the United States, though records are being added for other countries, such as Canada, the UK, and other European countries. Some records are free for anyone to access, but the majority are accessible only by paid subscription. As of 2001, the annual subscription cost for access to Ancestry.com's main databases was US$69.95.

On June 22, 2006, Ancestry.com completed the indexing and scanning of all of the United States Federal Census records from 1790 through 1930.

Ancestry.com was nominated for a 2007 CODiE Award in the "Best Online Consumer Information Service" category.

For genetic genealogy, Ancestry.com offers genealogical DNA tests of autosomal DNA, paternal Y-chromosome DNA, and maternal mitochondrial DNA. As of June 2014, Ancestry.com has discontinued its paternal Y-chromosome DNA and maternal mitochondrial DNA tests, and only carries an autosomal DNA test.

AncestryDNA

AncestryDNA is a subsidiary of Ancestry LLC. AncestryDNA uses a simple test to analyze an individual's DNA. AncestryDNA offers the potential of identifying new insights into people's ancient ancestry to help them collaborate with distant cousins and make even more discoveries into their family history.

AncestryHealth

On July 16, 2015 Ancestry launched AncestryHealth, a generational health database. At the same time, the company also announced the appointment of Dr. Cathy A. Petti, MD as AncestryHealth's Chief Health Officer.

Ancestry24

On October 22, 2013, Ancestry.com purchased Ancestry24, which had ceased operating in February 2013. It was an online archive and research service owned by Media24 that preserved South Africa’s history for future generations in the form of a collection of databases that included millions of records on individuals who have lived in South Africa since the late 1600s. Transcribed from original documents and reliable resources, records included births, baptisms, marriages, deaths, burials, passenger lists and voters lists. It also had an image library of over 33,000 graves.

FindAGrave.com

On September 30, 2013, Ancestry.com announced its acquisition of Find a Grave. Site editor Jim Tipton said of the purchase that Ancestry.com had, "...been linking and driving traffic to the site for several years. Burial information is a wonderful source for people researching their family history....” Ancestry.com launched a mobile app in March 2014.

Fold3

Fold3 is a subscription-based website specializing in historical military records primarily from the United States. It also has a large collection of documents dealing with the United States, city directories, and newspapers. Some record sets are free but the majority are accessible only by paid subscription. The website was originally named Footnote.com and independently owned when it launched in 2007. Footnote.com was acquired by Ancestry.com in fall 2010. As part of the acquisition, Footnote.com was later rebranded as Fold3 in an effort to focus on military records.

Genealogy.com

Genealogy.com as a company started in 1989 with the creation and marketing of the Family Tree Maker software. Genealogy.com matains a genealogy research website with some records not found on Ancestry.com, though the total number of records available is smaller. As of 2001, Genealogy.com was noted as being Ancestry.com's greatest competitor. Genealogy.com was acquired by A&E Networks in February 2001, and subsequently by MyFamily.com in 2003.

LongLostPeople.com

LongLostPeople.com allows one to search public records for living people in the United States.

MyFamily.com

MyFamily.com allowed members to create private family, or group, websites. Customization was limited. The 1998 version is still available but no further enhancements are planned. After three years of a beta release 2.0, it was running the first non-beta release, "MyFamily.com 2.5.3". However, since the architecture was changed so radically from 2.0 to 2.5, internally at MyFamily all references to v2.5 are actually being called v3.0. Users of version 3.0 (a.k.a. 2.5) last saw an update to the code in February 2010. Since that date both v1.0 and v3.0 have been 'frozen'. Migration services from v1.0 to v3.0 were stopped on 21 March 2010 with no reason given. Many features of the original version of the site were not ported to release v3.0, although new features such as video support, blog support, social group interface, and unlimited storage were introduced. Also in May 2010, MyFamily closed its Bellevue, Washington, development office, effectively letting its entire staff go since the offer to move to Provo, Utah, was not accepted by any staff. Since the loss of the Washington office, no new features have been added nor have any current problems or bugs been resolved. As of July 2010, free sites on v3.0 were discontinued. Ancestry shut down MyFamily.com on September 5, 2014. Members were informed they could download zip files of their data if they desired. At the shutdown, MyFamily had not resolved discontent with the downloading process, which consisted of capturing miscellaneous uncatalogued photos, with alphanumeric names and no data attached, and various calendar documents, thus leaving behind the associated data, File Cabinet documents, family recipes, and all other information.

Newspapers.com

Newspapers.com is a subscription-based website launched in November 2012, which provides access to historical newspapers, mostly from the United States, for genealogical and historical research.

Ancestry Academy

Ancestry Academy is a website that offers high-quality video instruction from family history and genealogy experts. Launched in April 2015, it covers a wide range of topics of interest in family history research, including Native American ancestry, online US census research, and DNA testing. New courses are added monthly.

RootsWeb

RootsWeb was acquired by Ancestry in June 2000. RootsWeb is a free genealogy community that uses online forums, mailing lists, and other resources to help people research their family history. Founded in 1993 by Brian Leverich and Karen Isaacson as the Roots Surname List, it is the oldest free online community genealogy research site. Users can upload GEDCOM files of their information for others to search at the WorldConnect portion of the site. Trees uploaded to WorldConnect are searchable at both the RootsWeb and Ancestry websites. RootsWeb provides resources (such as webspace, mailing list, message boards) for the WorldGenWeb project.

AncestryProGenealogists

AncestryProGenealogists is the official Ancestry research firm. Its professional genealogists perform private research for individual clients, as well as for various TV shows and public relations efforts.

Publications

Ancestry.com produces two publications: Ancestry magazine and the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, as well as the corporate newsletter Ancestry Daily News. Ancestry.com also published data sets on CD-ROM and a variety of books.

Site users and traffic

In mid-2001, Medill News Service reported the Ancestry.com had more than 350,000 subscribers. In the first quarter of 2012, Ancestry had 1.87 million users. According to Quantcast, as of April 2012, Ancestry.com reached a rough estimate of 8.3 – 8.4 million people in the US.

In the second quarter of 2014, Ancestry had 2.11 million users, for a loss of 52,000 subscribers when compared to the first quarter of 2014.

Family Tree Maker

Family Tree Maker (FTM) was advertised as "the #1 selling family history software". As with other genealogy software, FTM allowed the researcher to keep track of information collected during research and to create reports, charts, and books containing that information. The software was originally developed by Kenneth Hess of Banner Blue Software, which was purchased by Brøderbund in 1995. It passed through the hands of The Learning Company, Mattel, and others before coming under its current ownership.

A redesigned Family Tree Maker 2008 was released on August 14, 2007. The 2009 version of the program corrected some of the errors and omissions of its predecessor, and introduced a few new features. Family Tree Maker 2010 claimed to further enhance the radical re-design and be more powerful and feature-packed with faster navigation and quicker load times.

A version for the Mac was released in 1997, but due to low market demand was discontinued for over a decade. A new version of Family Tree Maker for Mac was released on November 4, 2010.

Family Tree Maker Version 16 was awarded a CODiE Award in the "Best Consumer Productivity Solution" category in 2006.

On December 8, 2015, Ancestry.com announced that it would discontinue Family Tree Maker. The announcement was met by fierce protest from Family Tree Maker users. On February 2, 2016, Ancestry.com announced that Software MacKiev, the company that had developed the Mac version of the software for more than six years, would acquire the Family Tree Maker brand, and take over the development and publishing of Mac and Windows editions.

FTM version history

Please press show for more information on past versions.

Past products

Past genealogy programs.

Partnerships

Ancestry.com is partnered with FamilySearch.

Ancestry.com is partnered with ProQuest LLC. ProQuest distributes Ancestry Library Edition worldwide to public and academic libraries, K-12 schools, and other institutions.

Ancestry is partnered with Calico, a company focused on longevity research and therapeutics, in an effort to investigate human heredity of lifespan. Together, they evaluate anonymized data from millions of public family trees and a growing database of over one million genetic samples. AncestryDNA and Calico will work together to analyze and investigate the role of genetics and its influences in families experiencing unusual longevity using Ancestry's proprietary databases, tools and algorithms. Calico will then focus its efforts to develop and commercialize any potential therapeutics that emerge from the analysis.