Why AncestryDNA?

What makes AncestryDNA so innovative is how it fuses DNA technology and family history in a way that’s never been done before. It works like this:

First, we look at over 700,000 genetic markers for each individual to create your unique personal genetic blend.

We analyze your DNA to find genetic signatures that connect you to the lands of your ancestors from hundreds, even thousands of years ago. The genetic signatures come from a set of well-established science as well as new DNA patterns that have been discovered by the AncestryDNA population geneticists.

Then, we compare your DNA to the over 120,000 other AncestryDNA customers to see who you might be related to. Here’s where things get even more interesting. When enough of your DNA matches someone else, that means you’re related. Systematically, your family tree is compared with your newfound relative’s family tree to surface shared ancestors, names and locations so you’ll not only know that you are related, but how you’re related.

All this innovative technology adds up to some pretty cool new ways to look back into your family’s story. And with more people taking the AncestryDNA test, new innovative features for discovering family history are made possible.

Some of the AncestryDNA team members

About the awards

The 11th annual Utah Innovation Awards program was presented by Stoel Rives LLP and the Utah Technology Council to recognize innovations and the Utah companies that created them.

A committee of approximately 60 professionals from private industry, government and higher education evaluated and voted on program finalists and winners. The more than 100 nominations were put through a rigorous evaluation process during which committee members evaluated each innovation against a wide range of criteria addressing elements such as novelty, market need, market disruption and potential/current economic impact.

Get an AncestryDNA test today for only $99.

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.

If you haven’t purchased or upgraded to Family Tree Maker 2012 yet, there’s never been a better time.

Since Family Tree Maker 2012 was released last fall, a number of updates have been sent out that include improvements and new features. Here’s a list of just some of these great changes:

• Numerous enhancements to TreeSync so syncing your tree to Ancestry.com is faster and more reliable
• A new Family View Report that displays a person’s ancestors, spouse, and children together (similar to the Family View in the People workspace)
• A new Undocumented Facts Report that lists people’s facts that have no source documentation
• The ability to merge info from multiple versions of the same fact
• New source templates for the 1940 U.S. census and improved support for city directories
• Dozens of report enhancements including performance improvements and new options in the relationship chart, family group sheet, Individual Report, Notes Report, Data Errors Report, Outline Descendant Report, Media Item Report, photo albums, Media Usage Report, Documented Facts Report, and calendar

And there are more enhancements to come in the next bonus update—so stayed tuned.

Which state are you searching first?

Do you have relatives in any of these six states? If not, stay tuned, our next indexed states are coming soon!

Search the 1940 census now!

Until next time – Have fun climbing your family tree!

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.

Other improvements in Family Tree Maker for Mac 2 include:

• New Mac-only features. Now you can capture photos using your iSight or built-in camera and import it directly into Family Tree Maker. And if you’re using OS X Lion, you can take advantage of the new full-screen capability—with one click fill your entire desktop with the Family Tree Maker workspace.
• Easy-to-understand combined family view. The family group view has a new “blended families” option that lets you display all of a couple’s children in one location, including stepchildren and adoptees. An icon next to a child’s name lets you see at a glance whether he or she is the child of the father, the mother, or both parents.
• More Ancestry integration. Find other Ancestry members who are searching for your ancestors by viewing Member Connect activity in the expanded Web Dashboard. You’ll also see links to message boards and notification of your new Ancestry messages.
• Enhanced performance. Now you can choose the type of Internet connection you’re using, which allows Family Tree Maker to tailor how it downloads information from the Web. Uploading and downloading speeds have been improved, and there is an increased ability to upload large files to Ancestry.com.
• New image collection. Create beautiful family trees and reports with a variety of new backgrounds and images.

To purchase Family Tree Maker for Mac 2, visit our store; the software is also available at select retailers such as Amazon.com, Fry’s, and MicroCenter.

Other improvements in Family Tree Maker 2012 include:

• Easy-to-understand combined family view. The family group view has a new “blended families” option that lets you display all of a couple’s children in one location, including step-children and adoptees. An icon next to a child’s name lets you see at a glance whether he or she is the child of the father, the mother, or both parents.
• Simplified interface for new users. When you install Family Tree Maker 2012, the software detects whether you are upgrading from a previous version of Family Tree Maker (version 16 or earlier). If you are, Family Tree Maker will display a simplified user interface that looks more like the older versions of Family Tree Maker.
• Improved Smart Stories. More content-generation and editing options help you create engaging stories about family members.
• New and improved reports. The Notes Report has been enhanced so you can display person, research, relationship, or fact notes you’ve entered for individuals. A new Index of Individuals Report lists every individual in your tree and their birth, marriage, and death dates in an easy-to-understand format. In addition, you can customize the descriptive sentences used in genealogy reports and Smart Stories.
• More chart options. The Descendant Chart has a new option that lets you show the relationship between two people you select. You can also display generation labels (such as parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents) in charts to highlight the relationship between the primary person in the chart and other family members. And you can now personalize charts by adding your own free-form text boxes.
• New and updated Help and tutorials. Learn how to do more—like creating trees and using Ancestry.com features—with new and improved tutorials accessible in the software and on FamilyTreeMaker.com.

To learn more about the 2012 release, please visit the What’s New page on FamilyTreeMaker.com. To purchase Family Tree Maker 2012, visit our store; the software is also available at Best Buy, Office Depot, Amazon.com, and other select retailers. For those of you interested in Family Tree Maker for Mac, a new version with TreeSync capability is slated to be released by the end of 2011.

In upcoming weeks I’ll be writing more about the new 2012 release. Be sure to come back to the blog to learn more about some of its new and exciting features.

Today, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com announce the launch of the World Memory Project. The goal is to build the largest free online resource for information about victims and survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution during World War II.

The Museum’s archives contain information on well over 17 million people targeted by Nazi racial and political policies, including Jews, Poles, Roma, Ukrainians, political prisoners, and many others. The Museum assists thousands of people worldwide every year that are searching for information about individuals in its collections. The World Memory Project will greatly expand the accessibility of the Museum’s archival collection and enable millions of people to search for their own answers online.

“The Nazis’ genocidal policies quickly turned millions of individual lives, filled with hopes and dreams, into massive statistics that are hard to comprehend. Through our partnership with Ancestry.com, we hope to remind the public that the Holocaust is not about numbers but about individuals just like us and to help families uncover histories they thought were lost,” says Sara J. Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Museum’s vast archives contain documentation that may be the only remaining link to an individual life. Preserving these personal histories and making them available online is one of the most powerful ways we can learn from history and honor the victims.”

Despite the Nazis’ efforts to erase human history, millions of their victims’ experiences were recorded in documents that still exist today. The World Memory Project enables anyone to help bring the information from these documents online – one record and a few minutes at a time – to help families discover the fate of lost loved ones and forge new connections that transcend war and time.

That is where you come in. The World Memory Project is a component of the Ancestry World Archives Project (AWAP), which we started a little over three years ago to help preserve records for generations, plus make them free and accessible online. It’s easy to get involved – anyone with a keyboard, a little time and an interest in helping preserve history can input information from the documents for the World Memory Project. And the indexes you help create will be available, searchable and online, free, to anyone at any time. You’ll find details about contributing as well as simple instructions for “keying” the records at http://worldmemoryproject.org.

Even a few minutes of your time can help families discover what happened to their loved ones and restore the identities of people the Nazis tried to erase from history. The power of truth is in your hands.

Although we’re thrilled to hit the 1-million-download milestone, I think this is really just the beginning for our mobile initiatives.  Not only is there so much more we can do with our existing app for Apple mobile devices, but we also have early plans in place for an Android app coming up on the horizon, as well as ideas around supporting Ancestry.com on other mobile devices.

We’re pleased that our users find such satisfaction in using the Ancestry app to learn more about and share their family genealogy.  I’d love to get more of your feedback on how we can improve the app, so please post comments with your ideas.