Ancestry Celebrates 40 Years of Family History Discovery

At RootsTech 2023, the world’s largest genealogy conference, Ancestry celebrated 40 years of empowering research and personal discovery through family history. Over the past four decades, Ancestry has advanced family history though product innovations, record collections and genomic discoveries.

Largest Content Collection in History

Since the very beginning of Ancestry, we have cultivated the world’s largest collection of digitized online family history content, with over 40 billion records from more than 80 countries, 70% of which are unique to Ancestry. In 2022, we introduced proprietary AI handwriting recognition technology to help us digitize records faster than ever before. 

We processed the 1950 U.S. Census in just nine days, whereas the manual transcription processor the 1940 U.S. Census took over nine months. We also added 5.2 billion historical records to Ancestry in just one year, a milestone that has never been achieved by any other family history organization in the world. And in 2023, we expect to add 15 billion more!

New in 2023

This year we are excited to announce that Ancestry has been awarded the rights to digitize and publish more than 3 million UK Ministry of Defense Service Records that will be made available only on Ancestry between 2024-2029.This will be the largest project around a particular set of records The National Archives has ever awarded to a partner. The digitization of these valuable records will enable people to access never-before-seen documents from World War II online. 

In addition, we will utilize our proprietary AI handwriting recognition technology to process the 1931 Census of Canada as soon as available, and expand our collection of newspapers.Com  Stories And Events Index to new states on a monthly basis. We’ll also be adding new collections of Catholic, Episcopal and Lutheran church records within the U.S. and additionally military and occupational records from the UK and Ireland.

Innovation through DNA Science

AncestryDNA continues to be at the forefront of the industry, most recently with the debut of its SideView technology. This year, we are expanding on this innovation with the launch of DNA Compare, which can give you a side-by-side look at your matches’ DNA results, as well as adding new communities and traits. DNA Compare will make receiving and viewing your DNA results with your matches that much more collaborative.

Storymaker Studio

In addition to our unmatched digitized content collection, Ancestry is proud to launch Storymaker Studio, a centralized, one-stop destination to curate facts, images, records and memories and create engaging, sharable stories. With this new tool, members can upload and enhance photos and images, record and upload audio files (for the first time on Ancestry), integrate photos with audio, and publish their Ancestry Stories to their trees, on their personal social channels and within the Ancestry community. We all have a storyteller inside us but with Storymaker Studio, you can become the story maker for your family’s history.

Checkout Storymaker Studio now at ancestry.com/c/product/storymaker or download the Ancestry mobile app.

Related Articles On FamilyTree.com:

Ancestry Introduces SideView For Greater DNA Insights

AncestryDNA Expands To 54 New Markets Globally

SideView Now Groups Your AncestryDNA Matches By Parent

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