We have recently released a beta version of our new public indexing initiative that we are VERY excited about! So far we have several people indexing in the new tool and giving us great feedback. We believe the project is a win-win to contributors as well as to Ancestry, and will give genealogists around the […]

Ancestry.com has been named as one of the best websites for Web researchers in Family Tree Magazine’s 101 Best Websites for 2008. RootsWeb, also operated by the Generations Network, appears on the list as well in the Best for Beginning Researchers category.
Ancestry.com and RootsWeb will be highlighted in the September 2008 issue of Family Tree […]

At the National Genealogical Society Conference in Kansas City a few weeks ago, Ancestry celebrated its 25th Anniversary!
Maybe you’re thinking: “Wait a minute the Ancestry.com website hasn’t been around that long!” You would be absolutely right. The company was actually incorporated as Ancestry, Inc., a genealogical book publishing […]

We doubled the size of our historical newspaper collection - adding a billion names and 20 million images. Different than census or other types of records, newspapers can add context through breaking news, gossip columns, entertainment listings, advertisements and much more.
As we dug into the collection, we found stories of local town heroes - such […]

Today The Generations Network and The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) signed an agreement that will make millions of historical records available on Ancestry.com. With the new agreement, Ancestry.com will have technicians and scanning machines onsite at NARA to continually digitize content for online access faster than ever before. To learn more about this […]

In conjunction with the 2008 National Genealogical Society Conference taking place this week in Kansas City, Missouri, Tim Sullivan has published a letter to the genealogy community. In it, Tim highlights several recently released content collections and product enhancements on Ancestry.com, and offers insights into new projects on the horizon.
Read the complete letter from Tim here.
  

Earlier this week, and just in time for Tax Day, we launched a collection of IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862 - 1918. Income tax was established in 1862 to help fund the Civil War, and most of the records cover the mid-1860s. Beyond stated income values, these assessments on Ancestry.com document personal property - pianofortes, […]

We have recently become aware of three websites purporting to allow family history research: SearchYourGenealogy.com, Ancestry-search.com and Australian-Ancestry.com. The sites claim to have “the largest online genealogical search tool” and promote themselves as the foremost resources for genealogy, but from what we can tell, these sites are nothing more than a series of web pages […]

Today we launched a collection titled Former Colonial Dependencies Slave Register Collection, 1812-1834, which will allow Caribbean Americans descended from British Empire slaves to delve into their history online.
The registers now on Ancestry.com include details for more than 2.7 million slaves and 280,000 slave owners from a total of 17 former colonial dependencies, including Jamaica, […]

In honor of Black History Month, we’ve expanded our collection of African-American family history records with two new collections: Freedman’s Marriage Records and Southern Claims Commission Records.
Freedman’s Marriage Records
From 1865 to 1868, plantation marriages of thousands of former slaves from 17 Southern states were legalized. Ancestry.com has digitized and made available online a collection of […]