Ancestry.com Introduces New Collaborative Features for Families to Share and Preserve Family Memories Online This Holiday Season

PROVO, Utah, Dec. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- To celebrate the holiday season, Ancestry.com, the world's largest online family history resource, today introduced new site features that make building family history something a family can do together. The new site enhancements let amateur family historians everywhere get the whole family involved in the creation and preservation of their personal family history. Now, anyone can build a family tree for free and invite their loved ones to contribute photographs, stories, cherished family documents, and personal memorials to a shared family tree, whether they live in the same home or are spread out across the world.

A family historian can either keep these personal memories and archival photos private on their Ancestry.com family tree, or they can choose to share their family history with the world on Ancestry.com, contributing to the largest collection of online family history records. When they are shared, these historical family photos and scanned documents then become searchable on Ancestry.com and available for family members, far and wide, to discover and add to their own family legacies.

When getting together with loved ones for the holidays, family members can bring their favorite family photos and memorabilia and take advantage of the time together to collect pieces of their family stories. Home sources such as photographs, family Bibles, documents (birth, marriage, or death certificates, etc.) and other heirlooms are often the best place to start when building a family tree. Searching through these keepsakes could reveal fascinating details about a family's past.

"All of us have treasured family photographs, documents, and letters stored in the back of our closets, attics, and filing cabinets," said Tim Sullivan, CEO of The Generations Network, parent company of Ancestry.com. "We all also have powerful memories, rich stories, and incredible family lore, both present and past. Now Ancestry.com lets a family work together to gather all of these memories, stories and heirloom documents in one place online to be shared and preserved for future generations. We're committed to making family history easier and something that families everywhere can do together."

Ancestry.com offers a comprehensive features set that empowers families to capture memories and relive the past through features such as family trees and person pages, a central source for photos, timelines, stories, and other rich records for each family member. The new enhancements will allow families to more easily share and bring their family legacies to life online.

In the past five months, Ancestry.com has experienced a surge in user-contributed content with more than 275,000 newly uploaded photos and 800,000 family trees created.

About Ancestry.com

With more than 5 billion names and 23,000 searchable databases and titles, Ancestry.com is the No. 1 online source for family history information. Since its launch almost a decade ago, Ancestry.com has been the premier resource for family history, simplifying genealogical research for millions of people by providing them with many easy-to-use tools and resources to build their own unique family trees. The Generations Network of family history sites, of which Ancestry is the largest, receives more than 9 million unique visitors worldwide and 450 million page views each month ((C) comScore Media Metrix, September 2006).