The following is a press release written by MyFamily.com, the parent company of Ancestry.com:
Ancestry.com Launches New Family Tree Building Tools With Powerful Search, Save and Share Features
PROVO, Utah, Sept. 6 -- Ancestry.com, the world's largest online family history source, today announced it has significantly enhanced its website's search, save and share features, creating a more personalized, collaborative, family history research and social networking experience. The revamped site provides more advanced tools to utilize the wealth of digital content available on Ancestry.com, including its more than 23,000 databases with 5 billion searchable names, which includes the recently added digitized and indexed U.S. Federal Census collection from 1790 to 1930.
With these enhancements, users can now build, organize and share their family stories through a variety of interwoven features such as Person Pages that provide a detailed snapshot of a family member's life events, fully indexed Member Trees, and OneWorldTree(SM), the world's largest family tree, which includes data from a collection of more than 500,000 user-submitted trees. Along with these newly added features, Ancestry.com has bolstered its free services offering, allowing users to create a family tree online, upload family photos, create life timelines and share trees with family members. In addition, users who are invited to view a family tree have full access to the family history records and photos attached to names listed on the tree.
"Ancestry.com opens a doorway to discovery with endless opportunities to research your family story, save your findings and share them with others," said Tim Sullivan, CEO, MyFamily.com, Inc., parent company of Ancestry.com. "We are offering more easy-to-use tools to help users save time and effort to achieve better results, enabling them to find and share a richer and more meaningful connection with their roots."
With Ancestry.com users can now take advantage of the following new features and functionalities:
* Search: Upgraded functionality makes searching more efficient and accurate, instantly searching the site's 5 billion names. Multi-functional family trees become a search tool that helps users fill in the gaps. Family trees combine content with convenience by prompting users with possible family name matches (through a shaking leaf icon), linking them to supporting documents and records, and connecting users with existing user-uploaded family trees as a part of OneWorldTree.
Newly designed search tabs feature four specific categories that enable users to define their own search universe and readily access data easier than ever.
- Historical Records: Census records, passenger lists, draft cards,
vital records, etc.
- Family Trees: Searches matching information from hundreds of
thousands of trees in one spot
- Stories & Publications: Newspaper articles, personal histories,
diary entries, etc.
- Photos & Maps: Photos of family members, ships, cities, buildings,
maps of then and now, etc.* Save: Person Pages can be created for each family member and serve as a storage location for a timeline of life events, stories, documents and records, photographs and other rich individual artifacts bringing individual family members' stories to life. Users can build their own family tree on Ancestry.com or upload an existing family tree from a GEDCOM file.
* Share: Users now have control over who has access to their content --they can keep it personal, share it with friends and family or make it public. Other members on the site can conduct a search and find whether a person they are searching for exists in any personal member trees and anonymously contact other users researching the same people or family lines.
To celebrate the launch of the new site, Ancestry.com is offering registered users a chance to travel back to the land of their ancestors' heritage through the Ancestral Vacation Sweepstakes. Every photo upload* of a non-living ancestor to your personal member tree (maximum of 5 per day) automatically enters your name into the drawing. The competition will run throughout the entire month of September, with the grand-prize winner receiving an all-expense paid trip to visit an ancestral place of origin of their choice. In addition, 10 winners will be chosen each week for additional 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prizes.
* More information and official rules on the Ancestral Vacation Sweepstakes can be found at http://landing.ancestry.com/offers/sweeps/default.aspx
Ancestry.com Membership Packages:
Annual membership:
$19.95 for the Family Trees & Connections
$155.40 for the U.S. Deluxe collection (equivalent to $12.95 per month)
$347.40 for the World Deluxe collection (equivalent to $28.95 per
month)Monthly membership:
$29.95 for the U.S. Deluxe collection
$39.95 for the World Deluxe collectionFree Services:
Ancestry.com offers free services which allow users access to various portions of the website. Users can create a family tree online, upload family photos, create life timelines and share trees with family members. In addition, users who are invited to view a family tree have full access to the family history records and photos attached to names listed on the tree. Users also have access to message boards, can browse the Ancestry Learning Center and Library and can sign up for free weekly and monthly newsletters published by Ancestry.com.
About Ancestry.com
With 725,000 paid subscribers, Ancestry.com is the largest online family history site and the premier resource for Americans interested in learning about their family history. Since 1997, Ancestry.com has been helping people connect to their roots, delivering a wealth of genealogical data to customers. Ancestry.com is the No. 1 online source for family history information, including the web's largest collection of historical records. Ancestry.com is part of a global network of sites under MyFamily.com, Inc., that includes Ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.ca, Ancestry.com.au, Rootsweb.com, Genealogy.com, and MyFamily.com. For more information, visit http://www.ancestry.com/
