Thursday, October 21, 2010

Footnote and Ancestry



Four weeks ago Dr D reported that there had been agreement for Ancestry to acquire iArchive along with its flagship database Footnote.comThis morning came a notice that the deal officially was completed today. As you may know there has been speculation among the genealogy community as to whether Footnote would continue to operate independently or would be absorbed into Ancestry. As of today the former option is being pursued.


The following is extracted from an email sent to current Footnote customers: 
"The plan is to continue to run Footnote.com the way we have always run Footnote.com." 
"It has been exciting to see Footnote.com grow over the past 4 years. Footnote.com started with only 5 million historical documents and today we have nearly 70 million searchable documents, over 1 million members, nearly 100,000 Footnote Pages, and over half million annotations added." 


So, at least for now, it looks like both will continue to operate as they had been operating. Will it continue? Is this a model of how other acquisitions such as Genline will be managed? Stay tuned for the rest of the story in future months.

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