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Ancestry.com
USINFO | 2013-05-21 09:37
Ancestry.com Inc. |
|
| Type | Private |
| Industry |
Online services Genealogy Online publishing Software publishing |
| Founded | 1983 |
| Headquarters | Provo, Utah, US |
| Key people | Tim Sullivan, President/CEO |
| Products |
Ancestry.com Genealogy.com MyFamily.com Rootsweb.com Fold3.com Family Tree Maker software |
| Revenue | US$399.7 million (2011) |
| Owner(s) | Permira and co-investors |
| Employees | Over 1,000 worldwide (2012) |
| Website |
International: corporate.ancestry.com Europe: ancestryeurope.lu |
Ancestry.com Inc., formerly The Generations Network, is a privately held Internet company based in Provo, Utah, United States. The largest for-profitgenealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical and historical record websites focused on the United States and nine foreign countries, develops and markets genealogical software, and offers a wide array of genealogical related services. As of September 2012, the company provided access to approximately 11 billion records, 40 million family trees, and 2 million paying subscribers.
In addition to its flagship site, Ancestry.com operates Archives.com, Fold3.com, ProGenealogists,1000memories.com, Newspapers.com, Genealogy.com, MyFamily.com, and Rootsweb.com. Family Tree Maker software developed and marketed by the company is advertised as "the #1 selling family history software".
Under its subsidiaries, Ancestry.com operates foreign sites that provide access to services and records specific to other countries in the languages of those countries. These include several countries in Europe (covered by Ancestry.com Europe S.à r.l.) as well as Australia, Canada, and China.
History
Infobases, Inc.
Ancestry.com headquarters in Provo, Utah
In 1990, Paul B. Allen (not to be confused with Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen) and Dan Taggart, two Brigham Young University graduates, founded Infobasesand began offering Latter-day Saints (LDS) publications on floppy disks. Allen's brother Curt and his brother-in-law Brad Pelo had founded Folio Corporation, where Paul Allen had worked in 1988. Infobases chose to use the Folio infobase technology which Allen was familiar with as the basis for their products.
The first products were floppy disks and compact disks sold from the back seat of their 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 on-line version in August 1995.
Ancestry.com
On 1 January 1997, Infobases' parent company, Western Standard Publishing, purchased Ancestry, Inc., publisher of Ancestry magazine and genealogy books. Founded in 1983 by John Sittner as a genealogy newsletter, Ancestry magazine had been launched in January 1994. 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's LDS Collector's 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 17 November 1999 from Ancestry.com, Inc. to MyFamily.com, Inc. Its three Internet genealogy sites were then called Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, and FamilyHistory.com. Sales for 2002 were about US$62 million, and those for 2003 were US$99 million.
In March 2004, the company opened a new call center in Provo as a result of outgrowing their old call center in Orem. The new call center accommodates about 700 agents at a time. 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.
The Generations Network logo (2007–2009)
On 19 December 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 of the inability to reach a mutually agreeable licensing agreement between TGN and the LDS Church. In 2010, Ancestry restored access to its site at Family History Centers.
On 6 July 2009, the company changed its name to "Ancestry.com".
In 2010, Ancestry sold its book publishing assets to Turner Publishing. In the same year, the company 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 5 November 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.
The company continued its partnership with NBC for the second season of the Who Do You Think You Are? television series in 2011.
In 2010, Ancestry.com expanded its location to San Francisco, California, starting its office in San Francisco with brand new engineering, product, and marketing teams. The San Francisco office is geared toward developing some of Ancestry's cutting-edge technology and services. Some of their recent initiatives include iPhone and iPad application development.
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 June 2012, rumors that Ancestry was working with Qatalyst Partners to put itself up for sale began to circulate.
In October 2012, Ancestry.com purchased a photo digitization and sharing service called 1000Memories.
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.
Products and services
Ancestry.com is a subscription-based genealogy research website with over 5 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 European countries. Some records are free for anyone to access, but the majority are accessible only by paid subscription.
On 22 June 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.
Site users and traffic
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.
Other sites
MyFamily.com allows members to create private family or group websites. Customization is limited. The 1998 version is still available but no further enhancements are planned. After three years of a beta release 2.0, it is currently 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 (aka 2.5) last saw an update to the code in February 2010, so since that date both v1.0 and v3.0 have been 'frozen'. Migration services from v1.0 to v3.0 were stopped 21 March 2010 with no reason given. Many features of the original version of the site have not yet been ported to this release, although new features such as video support, blog support, social group interface, and unlimited storage have been introduced. Also in May 2010, MyFamily closed their Bellevue, Washington development office effectively letting their entire staff go since the offer to move to Provo, Utah, was not taken up by any staff. Since the loss of the Washington office, no new features have been added nor have any current problems/bugs been resolved. As of July 2010, free sites on v3.0 were discontinued.
RootsWeb was acquired by MyFamily.com 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.[50] 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.
Genealogy.com is a genealogy research website with some records not found on Ancestry.com, though the total number of records available is smaller. Genealogy.com was acquired from A&E Networks by MyFamily.com in 2003.
LongLostPeople.com allows one to search public records for living people in the United States.
Footnote.com, acquired in Fall 2010, has a large collection of documents dealing with the United States, including military records, city directories, and newspapers.[53] Footnote has been rebranded asfold3.
ProGenealogists.com is the official Ancestry.com research firm.
Family Tree Maker
Family Tree Maker (FTM) |
|
| Original author(s) | Kenneth Lafferty Hess |
| Developer(s) | Ancestry.com, Inc. |
| Initial release | 1989 |
| Stable release | 2012 (29 Sept 2011) |
| Operating system | Windows, Mac |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Genealogy software |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | www.familytreemaker.com |
Family Tree Maker (FTM) is advertised as "the #1 selling family history software". As with other genealogy software, FTM allows 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 14 August 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 claims 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 finally released on 4 November 2010.
Family Tree Maker Version 16 was awarded a CODiE Award in the "Best Consumer Productivity Solution" category in 2006.
FTM version history
Please press show for more information on past versions.
Family Tree Maker version history
Past products
Past genealogy programs.
• Family Origins
• Generations Family Tree (Originally called Reunion for Windows )
• Ultimate Family Tree (UFT)
• ROOTS software series by CommSoft was one of the first publishers of series of genealogy software programs, created in the 1980s, and available until 1997. Commsoft released the following, ROOTS89 for the Heath H-8 series of personal computers, ROOTS/M for the CP/M operating system, ROOTS II for MS-DOS, followed by ROOTS III and ROOTS IV. The company also released ROOTS V for Windows along with Visual ROOTS for Microsoft Windows.
