By now, you have probably heard the news about Ancestry.com buying Archives.com. Before this sale, Archives.com was owned by a company called Inflection.com. How much do you know about the “family history” of Archives.com? It is rather interesting!
Inflection.com is the original parent company for Archives.com. Recently, they sold that portion of their company to Ancestry.com for $100 million. There is a very interesting infographic of a timeline on the Inflection.com website that talks about the history of Archives.com.
The timeline starts, or perhaps ends, (depending on which way you are looking at it), with the date April 25, 2012. Below it is a description of the significance of that date:
“Ancestry.com enters into binding agreement to buy Archives.com for $100M. Years of hard work from a brilliant team add up to one of the biggest events in online family history”.
If you want to start at the very beginning, scroll down the timeline. In March of 2009, Joe Godfrey joined the Inflection team. He helped to bring their idea of a simple and affordable family history website into fruition. “Responding to huge demand for historical documents, Inflection decides to test the waters of the family history market with a product designed with mom in mind.”
In July of 2009, GenealogyArchives.com was born. In January of 2010, GenealogyArchives.com got a new name: Archives.com. In October of 2010, Archives.com added hard-copy vital records to its features. In December of 2010, Archives.com partnered with NewspaperARCHIVE to integrate over 100 million newspaper pages into the website.
By May of 2011, the potential for family tree building was enhanced. In September of 2011, Archives.com partnered with FamilySearch.org to bring the entire collection of all the United States Census records online. On April 2, 2012, Archives.com partnered with the U.S. National Archives to release the 1940 census digitally. On April 17, 2012, Archives.com announced its partnership with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to digitize and index millions of church records that had never been digitized before.
Very recently, Archives.com was purchased by Ancestry.com. One way to think about this is to frame it in terms of a family history. Archives.com was born to Inflection.com. It’s name was changed. It made lots of friends and partnerships. And now, it is all grown up, and is leaving home to join its new family.
Image by Amy the Nurse on Flickr