ANCESTRY.COM LLC ACQUIRES FIND A GRAVE, INC.
PROVO, Utah, September 30, 2013
– 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.
