Ancestry.com scanned billions of census rolls, ship manifests and military files so people could hunt for their great-grandparents from the couch. Then it sold subscriptions to anyone building a family tree. It filed to go public in 2009, during a deep recession, and its subscriber count was still rising. Many subscribers stayed for years. They kept adding branches to their trees as new records came online.

A Utah Hobby Goes National

The company's roots go back to a genealogy publisher in Utah, a state with a deep tradition of family history research. Its bet was that genealogy could become a mass market if the records were searchable from home. Ancestry spent years and large sums scanning and indexing records. Every page it added made the collection harder to copy. Rivals could not easily match it.

Spit in a Tube

Ancestry priced its IPO at $13.50 a share in November 2009. In 2010 NBC began airing Who Do You Think You Are?, a show Ancestry sponsored. Subscribers kept growing. In 2012 the company launched AncestryDNA, which sold millions of saliva kits and linked customers to relatives they had never met. That same year a group led by Permira took Ancestry private for about $1.6 billion. Blackstone bought the company in 2020.

Cover: Old Oaks at Bas Bréau, Adolphe Martial Potémont. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an old oak (the family tree).