PROVO, Utah, Sept. 30, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ancestry.com LLC announced today it has acquired Find A Grave, Inc., the leading online cemetery database.
With over 100 million memorials and 75 million photos, Find A Grave has amassed an unparalleled collection of burial information. Over the past 18 years, it has grown to become an invaluable resource for genealogists, history buffs and cemetery preservationists. Find A Grave will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Ancestry.com, and will continue to be managed by its founder, Jim Tipton.
"Find A Grave is an amazing phenomenon supported by a passionate and engaged community of volunteers around the world," said Tim Sullivan, CEO of Ancestry.com. "We at Ancestry.com are so excited...honored really...to take on the responsibility of supporting this community. We will maintain Find A Grave as a free website, will retain its existing policies and mode of operation, and look forward to working with Jim Tipton and the entire Find A Grave team to accelerate the development of tools designed to make it even easier for the Find A Grave community to fulfill its original mission to capture every tombstone on Earth."
Ancestry.com plans to bolster the resources dedicated to Find A Grave to launch a new mobile app, improve customer support, introduce an enhanced edit system for submitting updates to memorials, foreign-language support, and other site improvements.
"Ancestry.com has been a long-time supporter of Find A Grave. They have been linking and driving traffic to the site for several years," said Jim Tipton, founder of Find A Grave. "Burial information is a wonderful source for people researching their family history and I look forward to working with Ancestry.com to help continue our growth and accelerate the pace of improvements."
The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
About Ancestry.com
Ancestry.com is the world's largest online family history resource with approximately 2.7 million paying subscribers across all its websites. More than 12 billion records have been added to the Ancestry.com sites and users have created more than 50 million family trees containing more than 5 billion profiles. In addition to its flagship site www.ancestry.com , the Company operates several Ancestry international websites along with a suite of online family history brands, including Archives.com, Fold3.com and Newspapers.com, all designed to empower people to discover, preserve and share their family history.
About Find A Grave
Find A Grave is a free resource for finding the final resting places of famous folks, friends and family members. With millions of names, it's an invaluable tool for genealogist and history buffs. Find A Grave memorials are rich with content, including dates, photos and biographies. Visitors can leave 'virtual flowers' on memorials to complete the online cemetery experience. Find A Grave also contains listings for thousands of celebrity graves, making it the premier, online destination for tombstone visitors.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the use of words such as "appears," "may," "designed," "expect," "intend," "focus," "seek," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "potential," "should," "continue" or "work" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. These forward-looking statements are based on information available to the Company as of the date of this press release. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include our ability to acquire and digitize new content, to provide desired content and product features to new and current subscribers and to otherwise satisfy customer expectations regarding the content of the collection, now and in the future. Information concerning additional factors that could cause events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements is contained under the caption "Risk Factors" in Exhibit 99.2 to our Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 10, 2013, and in discussions in other of our Securities and Exchange Commission filings. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date and we assume no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements.
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