For 17 years, Andre Kearns (MBA 1999) has been tracing his family tree. One by one, he has added branches, grounding himself in a long and sometimes complicated lineage. Through family stories, forgotten heirlooms, and vital records, Kearns has traveled back through the generations, revealing the stories of his great-grandmother Georgia Joyner, a sales agent for Madam C.J. Walker, the Black entrepreneur considered to be the first female self-made millionaire in the United States, and his great-great-great grandfather William Harvell, who was born into slavery in North Carolina and ultimately became a political leader during Reconstruction.

Eventually, Kearns discovered that he is a descendant of Emanuel Cumbo, his 10th great-grandfather, who was born to parents who arrived in Point Comfort, Virginia, from the Kingdom of Ndongo (in modern-day Angola) as bonded servants sometime between 1619 and 1628. Cumbo was one of the first African men to own land in the colonies. Kearns also discovered he is the great-great-great-great-great grandson of Johannes Schmierer, who immigrated from central Europe to North America in 1755, became a patriot in the Revolutionary War, and enslaved people on his land. Kearns has documented it all.

“Genealogy is an opportunity to uncover, be inspired by, and share stories of all people,” says Kearns, a marketing director for Amazon Web Services and board member of the nonprofit National Genealogical Society. It is also, he acknowledges, an enormous business opportunity. In just 30 years—the span of a single generation—genealogy has grown from the domain of historical societies, microfilm, and the Mormon church to big data, artificial intelligence, DNA testing, and staggering private equity investments. It turns out that money does grow on trees, or at least our family trees: By 2026, the hunt for one’s lineage is forecasted to be an $8 billion industry globally.

Genealogy consumers today expect their foray into the past to be aided by speedy and seamless technology.

Genealogy consumers today expect their foray into the past to be aided by speedy and seamless technology.

Any family tree documenting the modern genealogy industry would have its roots in Utah at the turn of the 20th century. In 1894, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints established the Genealogical Society of Utah in Salt Lake City, “the purposes of which are benevolent, educational, and religious, pecuniary profit not being the object,” according to its founding documents. Knowledge of one’s ancestors is considered essential in Mormonism; with the names of their relatives, the faithful can perform ordinances, such as baptisms and other sacred rites, on behalf of the deceased. To assist its members in their research, the Genealogical Society established a library. By 1912, it proudly boasted a collection of 2,000 genealogical volumes, primarily from New England and the mid-Atlantic states. Today the library, now a church-run nonprofit known as FamilySearch, is the repository for more than 5 billion pages of freely available digitized genealogical records from some 100 countries—the cornerstone of nearly all American and European family research.

Though it was originally designed for members of the Mormon church, the Genealogical Society’s library would become a mecca for amateur family historians who would shape the next era of genealogical research in the United States. Through the middle of the 20th century, they created formal and informal networks to help out-of-town researchers find their relatives in local historical society records and community graveyards. Stanley Diamond (MBA 1958) traces his own interest in ancestry back to this era.

In 1977, Diamond’s nephew Mark Diamond (MBA 1978) was diagnosed as a carrier of beta thalassemia, a genetic condition that manifests as mild chronic anemia. The offspring of two carriers have a one in four chance of having thalassemia major which, in the most life-threatening cases, requires frequent blood transfusions. The trait was known to be more common among certain groups, including the Sephardic Jewish community. With the surprising discovery of the trait in his Ashkenazi Jewish family, Stanley Diamond recognized the importance of warning his relatives that they, too, might carry it. It was easy enough to contact his mother’s large immediate family in Montreal and New York, with whom he had close relationships. But tests indicated the trait was present in Diamond’s father’s family, and Diamond was less familiar with that side of his ancestry. A series of coincidences more than a decade later put him in touch with a previously unknown cousin on his father’s side. That introduction opened the door to meeting other relatives and to the world of amateur genealogists.

Diamond began attending genealogy conferences and became a regular at his local library, which had a vast collection of telephone books. His paternal grandparents’ names were relatively unique, so he called everyone he found who shared their surnames. “My phone bills were astronomical; I used to say ‘I’m spending my kids’ inheritance,’ ” Diamond recalls. He even made a trip to what he still calls “the candy store of genealogy”—the Mormon church’s genealogical library in Salt Lake City, which had expanded its collections to include vital records from around the world as part of a microfilming project that began in the 1930s. “I spent a week cranking the microfilm reader,” he says. “When I got home, I could not lift my arm.” But Diamond also remembers the cries of joy he heard in the library when someone was able to decipher the hand-scrawled letters of a relative’s name on a microfilmed marriage license or death certificate. “It’s a sense of euphoria,” he says.

As he constructed a family tree that stretched back to the early 18th century, Diamond also began to think about how the process could be improved. His own search for his ancestry had been a combination of time-consuming and expensive research, plus plain old good luck; it also had been, at times, duplicative. Along the way, Diamond met another man who was researching the same Polish town. What if there was a way for family history researchers to pool their efforts? From that question, JRI-Poland (the Jewish Research Index) was born. The project, developed by Diamond and two cofounders, began in 1995 as a crowd-sourced effort to index the approximately 2 million Polish Jewish microfilm records in the Mormon church’s collection. In 1997, as executive director, Diamond signed a multi-year agreement with the Polish State Archives resulting in a database that now contains more than 7 million records.

“We were the very first country-based Jewish genealogical indexing project,” Diamond says with some amazement. In many ways, the early undertakings of JRI-Poland were like many such genealogy efforts of the 1980s and 1990s: ambitious, often self-funded passion projects that did not yet fully recognize how the internet would change every facet of society, including the search for our family histories.

The internet era of the genealogy industry began in 1996, when Ancestry.com was launched by two graduates of Brigham Young University who had previously produced Church of Latter-day Saints publications on floppy disks. The new subscription-based website would quickly become the world’s largest genealogy company, allowing users to build and share their family trees, digitizing and indexing vast troves of genealogical data, ever increasing through the acquisition of hobbyist projects and other genealogical startups.

In 2005, Tim Sullivan (MBA 1991), former CEO of Match.com, joined Ancestry.com as president and CEO. Over his 12-year tenure, he would oversee the company’s expansion into the global market, with geographically specific sites for Australia, China, and several European countries. Sullivan would take the company public in 2009. (He now sits on the company’s board of directors.) That year Ancestry.com reached 1 million subscribers; just three years later it would reach the 2 million mark. In the United States, the organization had become synonymous with genealogy research. Andre Kearns dates his own quest to uncover his family history to the day he signed up for the service.

Ancestry.com—and other online genealogy companies that flourished during the first dot-com boom—made family history research seem simple. Stanley Diamond had cranked through countless rolls of microfilm in a library in Utah; Ancestry.com users could search for relatives by name online from the comfort of their own homes. With that increased ease came rapidly rising interest in family history. In 1995, 45 percent of Americans had an interest in tracing their family trees, according to a poll conducted by a market research firm. By 2000, that number had increased to 60 percent—and another innovation was about to make the process even easier: genealogical DNA testing.

Paul Cusenza (MBA 1986), then at biotech firm Perlegen Sciences, began thinking about the potential of direct-to-consumer DNA testing in the early 2000s, as the first genetic tests focused on ancestry were coming on the market. Though they were expensive and of limited utility, Cusenza saw the science rapidly improving, and he recognized opportunity not just in the health care sector but also in the realm of family history research. “People want to know who they are, genetically. There is a natural curiosity about that,” Cusenza notes. In 2006, he and his partners launched genetic testing company 23andMe, and in 2007, the company released the first direct-to-consumer saliva test. (Cusenza left the company in 2007 but retains a financial stake.) At the time each test cost $999; today the company charges one-tenth that—$99—for its ancestry-focused testing.

In its earliest days, 23andMe targeted both the health-conscious consumer and those interested in ancestry, but when it faced temporary challenges from the FDA in 2013 about whether it should be regulated as a medical device, the company turned more of its focus to the family-history consumer. (In 2017, 23andMe received its first authorization from the FDA and pivoted back to emphasizing the health aspects.) In both areas, says Cusenza, education was key. Few people understood how DNA testing worked and what it could and couldn’t tell them about their health and lineage. “And, of course, we were very worried about people discovering surprises in their parentage,” he acknowledges. “We thought that, about 10 percent of the time, the father would not be the father you expect. You definitely disclose this to people who take the test.”

Despite the potential for uprooting one’s expected family tree and the privacy and ethics concerns surrounding sharing one’s genetic code with for-profit companies, DNA testing proved popular with amateur genealogists—and with the genealogy sector. Today, every major genealogical company has its own testing product. Ancestry.com, which launched its AncestryDNA offering in 2012, has now tested more than 23 million people. For companies like Ancestry.com, this genetic data is a growing business opportunity; under Ancestry’s policy, for instance, if consumers opt in, their anonymized genetic data can be used in scientific research. But most users are focused on the genealogical results, which Ancestry plots with ever-increasing specificity on an interactive online world map. Users can learn about migration patterns specific to their communities of origin or communicate virtually with other customers who share aspects of their DNA. “Genealogy is a technology business now,” observes Lorrie Norrington (MBA 1989), a board member at Ancestry.com.

“The records go so far, but how do we get beyond them?”
—Mike Feerick (MBA 1993)

“The records go so far, but how do we get beyond them?”
—Mike Feerick (MBA 1993)

Genealogy consumers today expect their foray into the past to be aided by speedy and seamless technology, says Norrington, an operating partner at tech investment firm Lead Edge Capital who joined the Ancestry.com board in 2021. She sees that as one of the main differentiators for Ancestry.com, which has become the dominant player in the genealogy sector, with 3.6 million paying subscribers globally. (The next largest is MyHeritage, which claims one million paying subscribers, primarily in Israel and Europe.)

Once every 10 years throughout its existence, Ancestry.com has faced a challenge in its ability to meet customers’ ever-rising technological expectations: the release of US census records. The US Census Bureau conducts a nationwide count once a decade; the National Archives and Records Administration releases detailed records 72 years later. For family history researchers, census records contain far more than numbers. They present a wealth of information about one’s ancestors: names, residences, relations, and in some years, the type of details that begin to bring the past to life. Census takers over the decades have asked about education, occupation, language, even whether a household owned a radio set.

Ancestry.com faced its first such test in 2002, when the 1930s census records became public. At 12:01 a.m. on Monday, April 1, the National Archives and Research Administration in Washington, DC, released the 1930s data on 2,667 reels of microfilm. Representatives from the company were waiting to ferry a full set of reels back to Salt Lake City, where each page would be scanned. Ancestry.com promised users that the first pages would be on the internet within 18 hours. The company predicted it would have every page posted within 90 days and that the arduous task of indexing each handwritten name in the census records—almost 123 million—would be completed in seven months. In reality, it took a team of hundreds about nine months. Still, it was far faster than the digitization of the 1920 census; eight years had passed between its release in 1992 and the completion of a searchable online index.

“With the 1950s census, we did it in days,” says Norrington. “I think we even surprised ourselves.” When the 1950 census records were released on April 1, 2022, in the form of 6.5 million digital images, Ancestry.com used what it described as “proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI) handwriting recognition technology” to analyze more than 150 million handwritten names and personal details to create a searchable index in under five weeks. (Ancestry.com also partnered with FamilySearch, which recruited 200,000 volunteers to verify the index.)

The advances the 21st-century customer expects are not limited to collecting information; they also want to be able to share it, Norrington adds. “We’re accelerating product innovation to help everybody share—stories, traditions, whatever—in their social networks.” The company recently introduced a feature called Storymaker Studio, to edit and colorize photos and record audio to enhance your family tree. Storymaker Studio also allows users to create Instagram-style “stories”—or photo and text slideshows—for sharing, another priority of the company. “The more the technology grows, the more the market grows,” Norrington says.

Investors seem to agree. In 2012, the public company went private in a $1.6 billion acquisition led by private equity firm Permira Advisors LLC; in 2022, Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Ancestry.com for $4.7 billion.

But tech will never tell the whole story of one’s family history, says Mike Feerick (MBA 1993), founder of the nonprofit Ireland Reaching Out. As founder and CEO of Alison, an e-learning company, Feerick seems to be an unexpected proponent for a return to the ethos of the pre-internet era of genealogy—until he explains the nonprofit organization’s role. “The records go so far, but how do we get beyond them?” he asks. “At Ireland Reaching Out, what we do is the last mile.” Once people trace their ancestors back to Ireland, Feerick and his volunteers introduce them to the country their relatives knew.

Over the last 14 years, Ireland Reaching Out—which began in 2009 as a way to encourage tourism during the recession—has built a community of more than 160,000 members and about 1,000 volunteers ready to welcome the Irish diaspora, estimated at 70 million people worldwide. “A volunteer brings you down and shows you the house your people were born in. They show you the land they farmed before they went to America. They bring you to the graveyard and show you your ancestors who are buried there. And then if it works at all, they bring you down to the pub and introduce you to living relatives,” Feerick explains. “The real, personal connection with people in Ireland is phenomenal. There’s tears everywhere, and it’s just lovely.”

For Andre Kearns, whose work at the National Genealogical Society includes serving as chair of the diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, all these pieces of the genealogy industry—from AI-enabled technology built by multibillion-dollar companies to volunteers motivated by a love of their ancestral homelands—are essential to uncovering our family histories. In his own quest, Kearns has interviewed family members, studied genealogical records online and in person, taken the DNA tests of six companies, met distant relatives, and grappled with hard truths. In the first days of his search, his hope had been to trace his family back to a named ancestor from Africa—a goal he accomplished—but along the way, his discoveries also led him to become one of the growing number of Black members of the Sons of the American Revolution.

“I would’ve never thought when I started this journey that I would have those types of experiences,” Kearns says. “People do ask me, ‘Why do you do this?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m living this wonderful life and I’m also getting to experience the lives of my ancestors, on whose shoulders I stand. It’s quite an adventure.”

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