As well as its main website, Ancestry operates country-specific versions for Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

[14][15] In 1990, Paul Brent Allen and Dan Taggart, two Brigham Young University graduates, founded Infobases and began offering Latter-day Saints (LDS) publications on floppy disks.

More growth for Infobases occurred in July 1997, when Ancestry, Inc. purchased Bookcraft, Inc., a publisher of books written by leaders and officers of the LDS Church.

[24] The company raised more than US$90 million in venture capital from investors[24] and changed its name on November 17, 1999, from Ancestry.com, Inc. to MyFamily.com, Inc. Its three Internet genealogy sites were then called Ancestry.com, FamilyHistory.com, and MyFamily.com.

[31] On November 5, 2009, Ancestry.com became a publicly traded company on NASDAQ (symbol: ACOM), with an initial public offering of 7.4 million shares priced at $13.50 per share, underwritten by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Jefferies & Company, Piper Jaffray, and BMO Capital Markets.

[33] In 2010, Ancestry.com expanded its domestic operations with the opening of an office in San Francisco, California, staffed with brand new engineering, product, and marketing teams geared toward developing some of Ancestry's cutting-edge technology and services.

The Dublin office includes a new call center for international customers, as well as product, marketing, and engineering teams.

On July 16, 2015, Ancestry launched AncestryHealth, and announced the appointment of Cathy A. Petti as its Chief Health Officer.

[42] That year, Ancestry partnered with the Google subsidiary, Calico, to focus on longevity research and therapeutics, in an effort to investigate human heredity of lifespan.

[47][48] Through vintage photographs, a woman was able to document eight generations of her family, dating back to 1805, including an interracial couple.

The advertisement was criticized by a news correspondent for Boston radio station WBUR-FM and MSNBC, and law professor Melissa Murray, on the grounds that it romanticized slavery in the antebellum South.

[54] In August 2020, The Blackstone Group announced plans to acquire Ancestry for $4.7 billion,[7] and in December 2020 the acquisition occurred.

[56] In March 2023, Ancestry announced that it had won a contract to digitize over 3 million British Army service records, which it would release from 2024 through 2029.

[57] Ancestry’s Board of Directors selected CFO and COO Howard Hochhauser to succeed Deb Liu as the company’s President & CEO effective February 1, 2025.

[63] In July 2020, the company claimed that their database contained 18 million completed DNA kits bought by customers.

Subscribers access an online database with military records, including stories, photos, and personal documents.

Geneanet explains that the acquisition by Ancestry is the consequence of the failure of the Filae negotiations with the birth of a formidable competitor.

The Geneanet.org site, which must remain autonomous, indicates that it will give access to many databases indexed by Ancestry within the framework of Premium subscriptions.

Some participants see the process of free scanning as an easier, cheaper and quicker way to get their publications online than working through the U.S. government-operated National Digital Newspaper Program.

[81][82] RootsWeb, acquired by Ancestry in June 2000, is a free genealogy community that uses online forums, mailing lists, and other resources to help people research their family history.

On December 20, 2017, a file containing 300,000 RootsWeb user names, passwords, and email addresses was exposed to the Internet.

[87] Forces War Records was a low cost provider of transcribed genealogical data from British sources.

[88][89] (See Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 315#RfC: forces-war-records.co.uk) They came under criticism for difficulties in canceling subscriptions, with a complaint about their misleading marketing being upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority.

'[91] Given that Fold3 had a negative perception as "US-centric",[92] the same dataset offerings and web architecture were used in the UK, albeit branded as Forces War Records, from April 2023 onwards.