Ancestry.com Acquires Archives.com For $100 Million

Utah-based genealogy site Ancestry.com just announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Silicon Valley-based startup Inflection to acquire its competitor Archives.com for $100 million in cash and assumed liabilities. Inflection’s other products, people search site PeopleSmart and Identity.com, are not part of this acquisition. A number of Archive.com’s employees, including some of its key product and engineering executives, will join the Ancestry.com team after the acquisition closes.

Similar to Ancestry.com, Archives.com focuses on helping its users discover their family history. The service’s archive of 2.1 billion historical records includes photos, newspapers and vital records. Just recently, Archives.com made news when it partnered with the U.S. National Archives to make the complete 1940 U.S. census available online. The service currently has about 380,000 paying subscribers who pay $39.95 a year for access to the site.

According to Ancestry.com’s CEO Tim Sullivan, “Archives.com’s focus is consistent with our mission to help everyone discover, preserve and share their family history, which will help continue our efforts in delivering amazing discoveries to an even broader audience.”

Ancestry.com, which also operates a wide variety of secondary sites like Genealogy.com, Fold3.com Rootsweb.com and Footnote.com, is a publicly traded company and had just under $400 million in revenue in 2011. Ancestry.com also just released its earnings for the first quarter of 2012 today. The company had an operating income of $20.1 million and $108.5 million in revenue. Ancestry.com had 1.87 million subscribers at the end of March.