The biggest challenge of the holiday season is finding thoughtful, personal gifts for friends and family. Who has the mental bandwidth to think of just the right thing for everyone?
Here’s a tip: An Ancestry®gift membership may be just the ticket.
With billions of records covering 80 countries, Ancestry offers the chance to do a little detective work, discover untold stories about your family, create a family tree, and connect with relatives.
For Globe-Trotters
The best part about exploring a new country is getting in touch with the local culture. Yet that can be hard to do in our globalized world, as hipster cafes proliferate and Instagram directs everyone to the same photogenic corner.
An Ancestry gift membership will help frequent travelers discover meaningful and authentic destinations.
By searching passenger lists and census records, your friends might find family ties to a small town in County Cork, Ireland, creating a compelling reason to explore beyond Dublin.
Other records could point friends to the centuries-old church where their Italian grandmother was baptized, the river route by which their ancestors went West, the battlefields where their ancestors fought in the Civil War, or the cemetery where an aunt is buried.
Such personal journeys inevitably lead to local interactions off the beaten path—the ultimate goal for serious travelers.
For the Newly Engaged
Learning more about your heritage is a great place when planning a wedding. As two families come together, they carry traditions with them that could inform the wedding day.
With an Ancestry gift subscription, they may find old wedding photos posted by a cousin to their public family tree, providing inspiration for fashion and décor.
Or they might find recipes shared on public family trees—like this traditional Appalachian recipe for apple stack cake—which could provide prompt menu ideas.
The family stories they discover with Ancestry will also be meaningful if they plan to have children, giving them a strong sense of their families before starting their own. (It’s also a font of baby name ideas.)
For News Junkies
These days, too many of us are caught up in the endless churn of the 24-hour news cycle. So give your Twitter-addicted cousin a break from partisan snark and bring him back to simpler times.
With an Ancestry subscription, he can browse public family trees for stories about various ancestors that other members have posted. This could include newspaper clippings, notes on family events or images from the family Bible, encyclopedia-style information, and other life facts.
Your cousin could discover newsworthy events from your own family—a lot more personal than national headlines.
For Empty Nesters
If your mom and dad bemoan that you don’t visit more often, give them an Ancestry gift subscription to show that you really do care about family. Your parents will get a kick out of discovering old wedding announcements, tracing your surname back to a Bavarian village, and perhaps finding royal lineage in your family tree.
The Ancestry U.S. patent database might turn up a relative who was a notable inventor, while employment cards might list an ancestor who was a Lower East Side peddler.
U.S. military records could reveal a gold star. Other records might reveal one of nine kinds of ancestors, such as a cowboy, a convict, or a freed person. Whatever your parents uncover, these family stories connect all of you, no matter how far away you live.
An Ancestry gift subscription’s perfect for anyone hoping to learn more about their loved ones. And it only takes a few clicks on your part.