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About

Ancestry was founded by Paul Brent Allen and Dan Taggart, who met at Brigham Young University and founded Infobases. The duo sold a publication about the ancestry of Latter-day Saints members on floppy disks throughout the 1990s, fostering their shared curiosity for genealogy. Floppy-disk databases gave way to subscription-based genealogy software in 1997 via CD-ROM. Allen and Taggart sold the rights to jointly owned publishing unit Bookcraft to concentrate on the database, which enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity. After launching international websites in 2001, Ancestry.com entered the NASDAQ as a publicly traded company in 2009