News Release from Ancestry.com
ANCESTRY.COM ADDS SIX MILLION NAMES FROM GERMAN CENSUS AND PORT RECORDS, LAUNCHES GERMAN-LANGUAGE SITE ANCESTRY.DE
New Collection Opens the Door for Largest Ethnic Group in the U.S. to Discover Their Family Stories Online; Fifteen Percent of Americans Claim German Descent
PROVO, UTAH – January 9, 2007 – Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource, today announced the addition of more than six million names from German port and census records to its historical records collection, making Ancestry.com the central online source for German family history. The German records launched simultaneously on Ancestry.de, Ancestry.com’s first foreign-language, international sister-site.
With more than 42 million Americans claiming German heritage, the launch of German historical records and Ancestry.de creates an unprecedented networking opportunity for Germans and German-Americans to collaborate, upload and share family trees, photos, stories and other historical content from their personal accounts on both Ancestry.de and Ancestry.com.
“The addition of new German content to Ancestry.com along with the launch of Ancestry.de is a major leap forward for families, but only the beginning of our long-term strategy to acquire international content and facilitate family collaboration worldwide,” said Tim Sullivan, President and CEO of The Generations Network, parent company of Ancestry.com. “We are excited to offer this collection to German-Americans everywhere to allow them to trace their roots across continents at the simple click of a mouse. I’ve already found my German great-grandmother in our Hamburg Passenger List collection.”
The German historical records collection features records such as passenger lists, census and vital records, sailors’ registry, ships crew lists, and family and local histories. The Hamburg passenger lists, which are the highlight of the new collection, includes records of more than five million people who sailed from the German port of Hamburg between 1850 and 1934. These records tell the story of each passenger’s voyage through such details as names, birth dates and places, date of departure, port of arrival, ship type and name, even accommodations on board the ship.
According to Ancestry.com, the roots of five favorite American brewing companies – Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors, Best and Yuengling – can be traced back to seven German immigrants. Thirteen-year-old Adolph Coors Jr., son of the Coors Brewing founder, and Frederick Pabst of Pabst Brewery, whose occupation is recorded as “Bierbrauer,” German for beer brewer, are listed in the Hamburg passenger list collection, both returning to America from trips to Germany.
Celebrities such as Donald Trump, David Letterman, George Lucas and Babe Ruth can also trace their ancestry to Germany.
Ancestry.de is The Generations Network’s fourth international site. Other international sites include Ancestry.co.uk in the United Kingdom, which features the only complete online collection of England and Wales census records, Ancestry.ca in Canada and Ancestry.com.au in Australia.
With more than 5 billion names and 23,000 searchable databases and titles, Ancestry.com is the No. 1 online source for family history information. Since its launch almost a decade ago, Ancestry.com has been the premier resource for family history, simplifying genealogical research for millions of people by providing them with many easy-to-use tools and resources to build their own unique family trees. Ancestry.com is part of The Generations Network, a leading network of sites whose mission is to connect families across distance and time. The Generations Network receives more than 9 million unique visitors worldwide and 450 million page views each month (© comScore Media Metrix, September 2006).
