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August 22, 2007

MyHeritage Expands Its Family Tree

Nick Gonzalez

7 comments »

myheritage.pngGenealogy site MyHeritage is merging with Pearl Street Software. Through the team-up MyHeritage will pick up Pearl Street’s VP of Technology and gain control of the #2 family tree software in worldwide sales (Family Tree Legends), the #2 family tree submission site (GenCircles) with more than 160 million ancestors, and more than 400 million public records in the Family Tree Legends Records Collection.

The addition of the team and products put the company in a better position to deal with upstart Geni, which announced over 5 million profiles in 5 months in July. They’ve also been getting a great deal of the press. However, Geni still has a long way to go when taking on the established ancestry industry. MyHeritage has a large lead on the site with over 10 million registered users of their site. Ancestry.com, the leading genealogy site, has added 5.6 million people to their family trees this week.

As a sign of the competition, MyHeritage will now be making all the Pearl Street Software free.

Update: This acquisition actually took place in December 2006 but was not announced until now. Integrtation been ongoing since that time.

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  1. Amy Wilsch

    August 22nd, 2007 at 2:14 pm

    Geni has 5million nodes, as you point out profiles (which often imply users) are units added to a tree, not registered users. [I hear that being misunderstood often by people especially in the press.] I didn’t know that Geni was going after the genealogical search market against Paul Allen the lesser, but this pits them all against Ancestry.com, AND the Mormon Church, which won’t take it lightly.

  2. RAK

    August 22nd, 2007 at 3:08 pm

    I haven’t tried the Heritage yet. But Geni is cool & nice. After a point of time, don’t know what to do with Geni.

    ~ Mails I Read
    http://www.mailsiread.com

  3. Jacob

    August 22nd, 2007 at 4:57 pm

    In this space Ancestry.com over 40mm registered users and 1mm *paying* subscribers making them the 2nd or 3d largest web based subscription service. They also have localized sites for the UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, Italy and France. Both of these upstarts offer little in terms of substance at this point and have a long way to go to catch up.

  4. Brad

    August 22nd, 2007 at 10:54 pm

    Jacob, take note: myheritage.com has 17 million registered users, who’ve joined since the site went up in 2006 (compared to Ancestry’s member base built over a decade), so at this pace they will certainly outdo Ancestry. As for localization, MyHeritage runs in some 15-20 languages. Ancestry (with 4 languages) and Geni (English-only) are far behind.

  5. Sven Schmidt

    August 23rd, 2007 at 12:57 am

    @Brad: My understanding is that MyHeritage.com has 17 millionen profiles. To be compared with the 5 million profiles of Geni.com. The clear market leader is Ancestry.

    FYI: We (www.verwandt.de) will launch a Polish version next month. Our blog in Poland is already up: http://www.moikrewni.pl/blog/.

    Best, Sven from verwandt.de-Team

  6. Sven Schmidt

    August 23rd, 2007 at 12:58 am

    Btw: MyHeritage.com is funded by Accel Europe. Should be mentioned and explains the funding of the M&A activity. This is a great and very smart deal by MyHeritage. Best, Sven

  7. Paul Allen

    August 24th, 2007 at 12:35 am

    Sven,
    I’m in Sweden for Genealogy Days and would love to meet up, maybe next week. I may be coming to Germany anyway. With all these interesting companies in the family/genealogy space, it would be great to talk in person and compare notes.

    My email address is paul “at” worldvitalrecords.com. I’d love to hear from you and see if we can create some more waves in the industry.

    When I was at Ancestry we made a run at buying Cliff Shaw’s first company, genforum.com, which I found as a fast-growing site on Netratings, but Broderbund beat us to it by 3 weeks. His early message boards were the best in the genealogy space because they were the simplest and first to be nearly comprehensive. It took us years to catch up with our message boards.

    I’m happy for him that he found a buyer for Family Tree Legends/GenCircles. Is he joining MyHeritage, or is one of his developers?

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