For the record, the following is a year end/new year message from Margo Georgiadis, CEO of Ancestry.
Dear Ancestry Community,
As 2018 comes to a close, I want to personally thank you for being a member of the Ancestry community. We appreciate that you’ve chosen us to provide you with the tools to enable your journeys of personal discovery.
All of us at Ancestry are committed to making family history discovery simpler, easier and more valuable for our members. As an avid user of our products, I was honoured to join Ancestry in May and have the opportunity to lead this incredible company. During the past six months, many of you have sent me notes with suggestions to improve our services, for which I am enormously grateful. The power of Ancestry has always been in its community and the ability for all of us to partner together to create the best Ancestry experience for as many people as possible.
My goal for the future of Ancestry is to build on our 30 years of family history leadership, bringing together an obsession for great customer experiences and using technology to unlock more possibilities for our members to create family trees, find and share stories, and make meaningful connections.
We have already started that work. Throughout 2018, we invested to comprehensively upgrade our technology and customer service platforms which underpin our ability to provide a faster stream of improvements. This new capability already has allowed us to significantly increase the number and quality of hints, add over 260 million new records from around the world, and release our next generation of ethnicity estimates for our AncestryDNA® offering, making results more precise.
In 2019 we will continue to bring together the strengths of Ancestry with a laser focus on delivering even better experiences to you. We have listened to your feedback and our ambitious plans for the new year include debuting many features that you have suggested. These include new tools for making discoveries in your family tree, an enhanced experience for connecting with your DNA Matches, innovations harnessing the power of our unmatched digital records collections coupled with our DNA network, and making many new historical records available online.
Thank you again for being a part of our Ancestry community. We look forward to continuing to partner with you in the months and years ahead. Please continue to share your feedback and suggestions.
Wishing you and your families all the best in 2019 and a year filled with personal discoveries!
Margo Georgiadis
CEO, Ancestry
Comment: This is the first communication from the CEO since she assumed the role last spring. The goal of "making many new historical records available online" is the last mentioned. The pace of new titles has slowed since earlier in 2018, notably for Canada and the UK. It's not a lack of material; Findmypast continues to add British titles (almost) weekly.
More useless information. Don't get me wrong; I do like Ancestry, but that message is very general and I'm sure Presidents and Executives from all different companies are writing the same thin, just changing the words around.
ReplyDeleteI am curious how you came to get the letter in the first place. I'm a member too and didn't get the letter.
Thank you
karenprytula33@gmail.com
I just got the message this morning and thought the same thing, It doesn't really say anything in particular but generalizes about changes "we" suggested. Sadly I am finding I use my MyHeritage subscription and Find My Past more often then Ancestry.
ReplyDeleteThis is the first I've seen of this letter, too.
ReplyDelete"We have listened to your feedback and our ambitious plans for the new year include debuting many features that you have suggested."
That would be a LONG awaited first. From past experience, that means they are going to mess something else up that is working fine now and then give us something we neither asked for nor want. More Spotify, anyone? Perhaps "update" findagrave again so that it's harder to see the information without scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. A few more adds per page should fix that.
Their focus is on selling DNA kits.
Toni, now you have me worried. Yes, we don't want anything screwed up or taken away. Its been awhile since I checked, but some time ago I still couldn't find ALL the message boards I was using, and those that I did find didn't display like they used to.
ReplyDeleteThey didn’t send that message to me either, even though I responded to the survey they sent me. Maybe that’s because none of the great “improvements” mentioned sound like any of the items on my wish list, the number one, most important of which was a chromosone browser.
ReplyDelete