Issue 24.14
Over the years Ancestry.com has built up a variety of products that enable their users to discover, preserve and share their family history. They bought a lot of other competing companies. They are working as a company to make family history easier, more accessible and more fun for people all over the world. In order to do this, they need to focus their core offerings to ensure they are delivering the best service and best product experience to their customers. To that end, they decided to invest more aggressively in the core Ancestry.com business and plan to retire the MyFamily.com service on September 5, 2014.
I used to use MyFamily.com more when it first came out in December 1998, but now Facebook combined with FamilySearch Family Tree have made it unnecessary for me to continue to keep up family sites there. It was a good service in the beginning, but it didn’t hold family member’s attention like Facebook does. It is so easy to find family and communicate quickly on social media now when trying to find family members and keep up. This is especially true for the younger generation.
If you have any information on MyFamily.com, you will need to log into your group site and request an export by clicking on the “Export Now” button located at the top of the page. MyCanvas is also being taken down but will produce orders until September 4, 2014.
Ancestry.com also had bought Genealogy.com and they are taking it away as well on September 5. This one used to be a competitor and has not been upgraded since they bought it. Hopefully they move all of the unique data over to Ancestry.com. Mundia is another site Ancestry owns that is going away. Personally I don’t remember ever using it.
The surprising thing is that they are taking away the Y-DNA testing and mtDNA testing. I think they are keeping the autosomal testing, but I find Y-DNA the most helpful of all of the tests for genealogy. But I prefer FamilyTreeDNA.com anyway, they have better custom service. If you have used Ancestry.com to test your DNA, and that includes Sorenson Molecular Foundation, you should transfer to FamilyTree DNA before September 5, 2014.
For more information, contact Shanna S. Jones 435.628.4900 shannasjones@msn.com