We’ve admired these guys’ work from a distance for a while now and we’re really pleased to have them join the team.  We are looking to leverage the smarts of the team and their technology assets to bolster our members’ ability to share their family history with others.

One of the pieces of technology they bring to Ancestry is their popular ShoeBox mobile app.   Shoebox turns your mobile phone into a photo scanner, providing an easy way to digitize paper photos and share them online or on your mobile device.

Coincident with today’s announcement, 1000memories will launch a new version of ShoeBox for iOS, which will allow Ancestry.com members to post photos directly to their Ancestry trees.  If you have an iPhone, I encourage you to go download the app and try it for yourself.

This is the first step in a broader plan to help Ancestry members more easily share their family’s history with their family, friends and internet-at-large.

For more details, see the official company announcement on our corporate website.

You may already know of Archives.com – a fast-growing family history site that has clearly attracted new users to family history with a product that is easy to use and one that has proven to be a great way for people to get started with family history.

Over the past two years, Archives.com has done a great job building strong relationships with a number of key family history organizations, including a partnership with the U.S. National Archives to provide free digital access to the recently released 1940 Census. These types of relationships, along with some creative content acquisition strategies, have helped build out Archives.com robust collection of 2.1 billion family history records and expand the interest in family history.

So what does this all mean? It means that the acquisition will enable Ancestry.com to add a differentiated service targeted to a complementary segment of the growing family history category. In addition, Ancestry.com will welcome a team of talented engineers, digital marketers, and family history innovators into the Ancestry.com fold and also gain access to a proprietary technology platform that has supported Archives.com’s rapid growth.

We view this acquisition as a coming-of-age moment for the online family history category.  The success of companies like Archives.com, and the innovation we see across our industry, in many ways validates the work done over many years to build category awareness. Additionally, it’s a way for us to accelerate our strategy of serving multiple customer segments with well differentiated offerings. Upon completion of the transaction, our plan is to keep Archives.com as a distinct brand and site, to continue to nurture its existing partnerships, and to continue to invest in new content, product and technology.

There have never been more products and services available to genealogists than there are today, and we are excited to help the talented Archives.com team continue to grow alongside Ancestry.com and look forward to helping them achieve their vision for a great online family history service.

You may have noticed that we now have a link entitled Privacy (rather than just Privacy Statement) at the bottom of our Ancestry.com site. It now includes our new Privacy Philosophy, along with links to our official Privacy Statement (updated) and the comprehensive Privacy Center.

Note: The new Philosophy is not replacing our official Privacy Statement. We wanted to put everything about privacy in one place for you, in what we hope is in a digestible and transparent form.

This isn’t just about updating our privacy language to make it more comprehendible (though we are pretty sure it will help you have a better understanding of Ancestry.com’s approach to privacy). Our purpose in adding our Privacy Philosophy and spending time to develop our Privacy Center, is to help you feel more comfortable with what’s available on the site and be rest assured that your content and information you share about yourself and your family on Ancestry.com is protected.

The Privacy Center has a lot of helpful information around privacy related topics all in one place to make it easy for you to find answers to your questions.

For example, the explanations dive into how you can control what other people see about you. It’s also about continuing to educate you on the privacy options available on the site, so you can decide which levels you feel comfortable with.

If you haven’t had a chance, take some time to visit our updated Privacy Center.

Plus, help us continue to improve the page and how we communicate our privacy by letting us know what you think. Use the “Send us feedback” link on the right side of the Privacy Center to provide us with your thoughts.

This is the 31st year that IAJGS (International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies) has hosted this conference and we’re excited to be involved for another year. With more than 200 sessions for beginner to expert genealogists, this 6-day conference is invaluable for helping you uncover your family history mysteries. Attend breakfast with experts for help with “brickwalls.” Have lunch and mingle with others researching your ancestral region or surname. And get a chance to meet and talk to the people who design the tools at Ancestry.com that help you discover your family history.

Need more information? You’ll find all the details and be able to register at http://dc2011.org/. Plus, register before August 1 and you’ll save $30 on your registration costs.

As many of you know, there’s nothing like the feeling of discovering your family story.  And now you can share that feeling with your loved ones with an Ancestry.com gift membership that lasts up to a year, plus avoid the long shopping lines this holiday season.

With a gift membership, your loved one will get full access to billions of U.S. or international historical records on our site, plus they’ll be able to leverage the millions of family trees and helpful, timesaving tools available. The discoveries your friends and family can make on Ancestry.com will be a gift for generations to come.

So avoid the Black Friday shopping chaos and give a gift that will make the whole family happy. Gift memberships  are now available by visiting www.ancestry.com/gift.

During these times, the Ancestry.com Blog and the Ancestry.com Rootsweb Community will not be available.

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UPDATE AS OF FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2010

Please note that this survey is now closed. We appreciate everyone that took the time to take the survey and look forward to digging into the feedback you provided.

The new U.S. School Yearbook collection makes starting your family history even easier by adding an entirely new dimension to your research. Yearbooks contain graduation and candid photos, which add insight into an ancestor’s extracurricular activities in school. Along with our ever-expanding database of billions of other historical records, the U.S. School Yearbook collection will help you discover the deeper details about your ancestors that you may have not otherwise been able to find.

Like Barbara Lily, who experienced an amazing discovery in the yearbook collection.  Her father’s parents were immigrants and too busy raising 7 children to worry about taking pictures. So Barbara had never seen any pictures of her father in his childhood…that is until she stumbled across the U.S. School Yearbook collection and found a 1928 photo of her father in 8^th grade. Barbara couldn’t believe the face that stared back at her. Long after time had taken her father, history had held onto a piece of him, and helped Barbara discover a part of her father that she had never known.

The new U.S. School Yearbook collection is fully searchable by name, state, city, school, year and even estimated date of birth. So even if you have searched this database before, with the addition of millions of records, you’re bound to find something new.

This addition makes Ancestry.com the home to the world’s largest searchable online yearbook collection. The records, consisting of 10,000 yearbooks, came from high schools, junior highs, academies, colleges, and universities—military, public, parochial, and private.  The collection covers almost every state in the United States and spans over 100 years (1875-1988).

So, for anyone interested in discovering their ancestors in the new yearbook collection, visit www.ancestry.com/yearbook to search the full collection of 60 million records.

Once you have found your ancestor in a yearbook, keep your eyes open for class histories, nicknames, statement of aspirations and involvement in clubs and other activities. The U.S. School Yearbook collection gives an amazing opportunity to find out new things about your ancestors.

And within both of their stories, we are able to take away something that we can apply to our own family history research.

For example, if you wanted to start searching to see if any of your ancestors were part of the original gold miners, then you should check the 1850 U.S. Federal Census for California to see if your ancestors were Forty-Niners.

Or if you have a more complex family history line, like Lisa Kudrow, you can find experts to answer questions, research records, pick up documents, take photos, translate papers, or tackle full research projects through the Ancestry.com Hire an Expert tab.

For more details about both episodes, check out our original blog posts for Lisa Kudrow and Sarah Jessica Parker that spell out the particulars about each episode and other tips and tricks that could be helpful in your own family history research.

Don’t miss the next two weeks where NBC will be airing the journeys of Emmitt Smith and Brooke Shields. Tune in Friday August 27^th at 8/7c to see Emmitt learn of his African roots, and the following week where Brooke Shields discovers her family comes from two different worlds.

And then let us know your family history research experience. What family history tips have you gathered from watching the series Who Do You Think You Are?

Ancestry.co.uk’s biggest release of the year officially went online. The National Probate Calendar will help you uncover details of your ancestors’ wealth, social standing and even their hobbies and interests, plus point you in the direction of further family members. It’s now available for everyone to search online for the first time.

We’ve put together a complete guide to using this comprehensive collection, complete with step-by-step instructions. However, I’ll sum up why it’s so important here.

Every time a person dies, a court appoints someone to distribute their property. This process is called probate, and since 1858 it has been the sole responsibility of the Principal Probate Registry.

For many years, the Registry kept summaries of all its cases in calendars. These calendars, for most years between 1861 and 1941, are the records that you can now search at our site. This means there’s an entry for the vast majority of people who died in that period.

Find an ancestor in these records, and you’ll discover their full name, their date and place of death, and the executor of their will – often another family member. Crucially, you’ll also find the value of their estate, revealing whether your family lived in luxury or squalor.

That’s not all. Once you’ve pinpointed a member of your family in the Calendar, you can use its information to order copies of all their other probate records, usually including a will, direct from the Probate Office. Find out more.

We’ll be interested to hear how you get on with the records – please let us know in the comments below. I found three of my ancestors within five minutes of logging on this morning – I’m now trying to work out where all the money listed in their wills has disappeared to!