September 6, 2013, Standard-Examiner, Ancestry.com joins forces with LDS owned FamilySearch, by Genelle Pugmire,

September 6, 2013, Standard-Examiner, Ancestry.com joins forces with LDS owned FamilySearch, by Genelle Pugmire, Daily Herald, 

PROVO -- Provo-based Ancestry.com announced Thursday a long-term strategic partnership with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' FamilySearch International. The landmark partnership is anticipating it will provide one billion international digitized genealogical records online in the next five years for Ancestry subscribers.

According to Mike Houston, Senior Manager of Corporate Communications with Ancestry.com, "The announcement marks a major investment by Ancestry.com in international content and we look forward to continuing our collaborative effort with FamilySearch to help individuals discover, preserve and share their family history."

According to the statement released Thursday, Ancestry.com expects to invest more than $60 million over the next five years in the project alongside thousands of hours of volunteer efforts facilitated by FamilySearch.

Ancestry.com says the announcement marks a major investment by their company in international content and they look forward to continuing their collaborative effort with FamilySearch to help individuals discover, preserve and share their family history.

Ancestry.com and FamilySearch International are the two largest providers of genealogical records in the world. The two services will work together with the archive community over the next five years to digitize, index and publish records from the FamilySearch vault.
"This agreement sets a path for the future for Ancestry.com and FamilySearch to increasingly share international sets of records more collaboratively," said Tim Sullivan, CEO of Ancestry.com. "A significant part of our vision for family history is helping provide a rich, engaging experience on a global scale. We are excited about the opportunities it will bring to help benefit the family history community and look forward to collaborating with FamilySearch to identify other opportunities to help people discover and share their family history."

With the new partnership, the two organizations will be searching out new ways to share content, besides this current project.

"Both organizations expect to add to the already digitized records shared across the two websites, in addition to new record projects to be completed over the next five years," the release stated.

"We are excited to work with Ancestry.com on a vision we both share," said Dennis Brimhall, President of FamilySearch. "Expanding online access to historical records through this type of collaboration can help millions more people discover and share their family's history."

With millions of users, FamilySearch International is the largest genealogy organization in the world. The FamilySearch records, resources and services help their users to learn more about their family history.

The two organizations have collaborated before and earlier this year announced a project to publish 140 million U.S. Wills & Probate images and indexes over the next three years -- creating a national database of wills and other probate documents spanning between the years 1800-1930 online for the very first time.

"This means we're serious about getting more content for our customers," Houston said. Houston also noted Thursday's announcement makes this new partnership project the largest in the Ancestry.com group.

General membership in Ancestry.com is $19.99 a month. Ancestry.com is the world's largest online family history resource with approximately 2.7 million paying subscribers across all its websites. More than 11 billion records have been added to the Ancestry.com sites and users have created more than 50 million family trees containing more than five billion profiles.