The company recently known as The Generations Network has been through a long and somewhat circuitous existence. The company started out as Ancestry Publishing, a small publisher of genealogy books. Soon after launching its first web site, the corporate name was changed to Ancestry.com. Since then, the company has changed its corporate name about once every 2 or 3 years. This has been good business for some sign painter in Provo, Utah: frequently updating the sign on the front of the building.
Company officials have announced still ANOTHER name change: this time they are reverting back to Ancestry.com.
I think this is a good idea. After all, most genealogists have always called the company Ancestry.com, regardless of the sign on the front of the building.
The following announcement was written by The Generations... uh, Ancestry.com:
PROVO, UTAH – July 6, 2009 – The Generations Network, the world’s leading online family history resource, today announced that it is changing its name to Ancestry.com effective immediately.
“Our company has a long and fascinating history, and we’ve been through several name changes over the years. But we started with Ancestry.com, and it now feels completely natural to let our company once again share the Ancestry.com brand with our flagship product,” said Tim Sullivan, CEO, Ancestry.com. “We’re proud that Ancestry.com has developed as the defining online brand associated with family history. Alongside Ancestry.com, we will continue to support our other brands, including Family Tree Maker, myfamily.com, MyCanvas, Rootsweb, Genealogy.com, Jiapu.com and of course, our international Ancestry sites.”
Ancestry.com
- Ancestry.com is the world's leading online family history resource, with more than 4 billion records, proprietary search technologies and an engaged community of 950,000 subscribers and more than 3.5 million active members.
- Ancestry.com boasts the only completely indexed online U.S. Federal Census Collection (1790-1930), the most comprehensive online compilation of U.S. ship passenger lists (1820-1960), the largest online collection of African American historical documents and the most comprehensive online collection of U.S. military records, among others.
Global Ancestry Sites
- Beyond the United States, the Ancestry global network includes local country sites for the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Italy, France and Sweden.
- In August 2008, Ancestry launched a dedicated Chinese family history Web site, jiapu.com.
Complementary Product Lines
- Ancestry.com DNA now extends the Ancestry service into the field of genetic genealogy.
- MyCanvas, a digital publishing platform integrated into Ancestry.com, now gives every family the ability to create completely unique, professionally printed family history books.
- Family Tree Maker® 2009, the No. 1-selling family history software package, is now available online and in major retail stores throughout North America and Europe.
- The redesigned myfamily.com site now has new features, providing families everywhere a safe, private, and free family home on the Web.
The Generations Network operates through two companies; Generations Holding, Inc., which is changing its name to Ancestry.com Inc. and The Generations Network , Inc., which is changing its name to Ancestry.com Operations Inc. The company will refer to itself as Ancestry.com.
For more information, or to build your family tree and discover your family history, visit www.ancestry.com.
About Ancestry.com
Ancestry.com is the world's leading resource for online family history and has digitized and put online over 4 billion records over the past twelve years. Ancestry users have created over ten million family trees containing over one billion profiles. Ancestry.com has local Web sites directed at nine countries, and more than 8 million unique visitors spent more than 4 million hours on an Ancestry Web site in April 2009 (comScore Media Metrix, Worldwide). For more information on Ancestry.com and its other family history resources, visit http://corporate.ancestry.com.
Without taking undue exception to "completely unique, professionally printed family history books," I think it is media hype. Some of the new colours on their web site make text difficult for some to read. With all the other changes I think we can expect a subscription fee increase, again.
Happy Dae·
http://ShoeStringGenealogy.com
Posted by: Dae Powell | July 07, 2009 at 08:20 AM
I don't care what they call themselves as long as they keep digitizing original records and posting them on their site!
I am sure the cost of my subscription is more than paid for by the hours I am sitting at the computer instead of out shopping.
Posted by: Nancy | July 09, 2009 at 01:47 PM
When will they be listed on the stock exchange?
Posted by: Bari | July 14, 2009 at 02:12 AM
The family books are pretty, expensive, and far too confining to be a serious option for anything more than a family scrapbook. MyCanvas is a money machine for Ancestry, not that that is a bad thing, but researchers wanting to publish an actual book will need to look elsewhere.
FTM is a poor choice as a genealogy program. There are much better programs out there like RootsMagic and Legacy that don't have the budget to compete marketing-wise. If they did FTM wouldn't sell too well.
As an online repository Ancestry is terrific, however. Often maligned by the "free lunch" crowd, I am a subscriber and don't begrudge the cost one bit. One trip to the only major genealogy library near my home (Mid Continent) is worth 3 months of my subscription - and as good as MC is they don't have half the content, or any of the finding tools Ancestry does. Ancestry also spawns a spinoff benefit for researchers. Some terrific new services like Footnotes, Genealogy Bank and World Vital Records have arisen and compete with Ancestry by filling niches that Ancestry's broad service doesn't. The competition is great for genealogists as it has greatly enriched what's available online. What the "free lunch" crowd misses is the fact that the pace of digization would crawl along if there was no profit. That's not a dirty word - it's what drives our world and drives the pace of digization online.
Posted by: Chuck | July 17, 2009 at 09:08 AM
I am a long time Subscriber to Worldwide Deluxe Ancestry. The content is excellent and growing yearly. So I pay my dues and use it. However there are 2 very key problems to Ancestry and they are related. Ancestry rolls out computer changes that have Very Bad Bugs. I can only conclude the stuff has not been Beta tested by Real Genealogists doing Real Genealogy. They seem to look at their products and decide what changes would look good in marketing hype and execute them. But apparently the Project Managers have not specified to the IT executors requirements that make sure the stuff, especially the core Genealogy, works as it did in the past.
Two examples. Just last week they rolled out "Enhanced Viewer". The trouble is 2 unintended consequences occurred. In summary, 1) much of the Search Accuracy capability along with untold thousands of corrections that users had made over several years to the Records (mostly Census) had been lost. After hundreds of users screaming at them they restored the "Old Search" option. 2) most users could not print at all and the capability where you "zoomed in" on part of the record and then "printed current view" (enlarged) on an entire 8.5 x 11 sheet disappeared. They have restored some of the "print at all", but you can still not "Print Current View".
Year before last Ancestry decided to revamp Family Tree Maker. Certainly FTM is not one of the better programs for doing Genealogy info presentation, but one of the things FTM 2006 did well was insert the cursor in the Name block for an individual and have it go look in all the databases for possible occurrences of that individual in Ancestry databases. For that reason alone, I use FTM for my base program. Yes, you get much garbage you should not have to look at, but sometimes you find records you would not have likely found at all. So for FTM 2008 they revamped the entire base Computer program and sold it based on better "interconnectivity" with Ancestry. I bought the sales pitch and bought the program. Just one example of execution that was so poor it is inconceivable was generation of Genealogy Reports. No real Genealogist of any experience just generates a Genealogy Report and prints it out (which FTM 2008 also did not do right by including huge blocks of white paper spaced throughout), but they save as an .rft document. Then they open it in a word processor, edit it, add other info, save it then either print it out or send it to another Genealogist. The Genealogy Reports were not even in .rft format or ANY editable format. They were a bunch of "cells" completely un-editable! FTM 2008 is the worse Computer Program I have ever used! Not the worse Computer Genealogy Program, but the worse Computer program of any type! It is impossible the program was Beta tested by real Genealogists doing real Genealogy! FTM 2009 has in my opinion less than 5% of the problems fixed.
Posted by: Walter C | August 06, 2009 at 07:50 PM
FTM 2008 WAS tested by real genealogists. I was one of them. We submitted our comments and complaints and suggestions, which were all ignored. They did what they wanted in spite of our input.
Posted by: Janeane | August 10, 2009 at 11:47 AM
Happy Dae is right about the colors of the website making it hard to read. This low contrast stuff is spreading like a plague on the web. I complained to one site and was told their "designer" had "research" showing it was easier to read.
Posted by: Karen Anne | October 23, 2009 at 08:21 PM