Ancestry.com, Inc., formerly The Generations Network, is an Internet company based in Provo, Utah, USA, and the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world. They run a network of genealogy and family-related websites, listed below.
In addition to their main sites, Ancestry.com, Inc., operates FamilyHistory.com, which contains basic information for free, but mostly serves as a portal to Ancestry.com. They also publish Ancestry Magazine and formerly published Genealogical Computing. They have a presence in the United Kingdom under the name Ancestry.com Inc., whose offices are located in Hammersmith, London, England and Munich, Germany.
In 1990, Paul Allen (not to be confused with Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen) and Dan Taggart, two Brigham Young University (BYU) graduates, founded Infobases and began offering LDS (Latter-day Saints — Mormon) publications on floppy disks. Allen's brother Curt and his brother-in-law, Brad Pelo, had founded Folio Corporation, where Paul Allen had worked in 1988. Infobases chose to use the Folio infobase technology which Allen was familiar with as the basis for their products.
The first products were floppy disks and compact disks sold from the back seat of their car. In 1994 Infobases was named among Inc. magazine’s 500 fastest-growing companies. Their first offering on CD was the LDS Collectors Edition, released in April, 1995, selling for $299.95, which was offered in an on-line version in August 1995.
On January 1, 1997, Infobases' parent company, Western Standard Publishing, purchased Ancestry, Inc.