OREANDA-NEWS. May 19, 2016. Ancestry.com LLC, the largest provider of family history and personal DNA testing, announced today that its subsidiary has entered into a definitive Agreement and Plan of Merger to acquire Adpay, Inc., creators and operators of the Memoriams.com obituary input network.

“Memoriams.com is a great addition to the Ancestry family. Together with Newspapers.com, it enables us to help newspapers across the country strengthen and grow their business and presence in their communities,” said Brian Hansen, SVP of Emerging Businesses at Ancestry.  “We are excited to have this incredible team onboard and look forward to helping them accelerate their growth.”

Memoriams.com is the largest and fastest growing obituary platform, submitting to approximately 3,000 newspapers in the U.S. from a rapidly growing number of funeral homes.  Designed for funeral directors and newspaper publishers, Memoriams.com streamlines the obituary entry process to better support the needs of families, eliminate errors and reduce overhead for funeral homes, and increase revenue for newspapers. 

Memoriams.com is the only national network allowing funeral directors to submit and pay for obituaries in the local newspaper and out-of-area publications in a single order. Newspapers partnering with Memoriams are seeing a 30% increase in obituary revenues on average.  Memoriams is a partner of the Local Media Consortium, representing more than 1,600 daily newspapers, as well as many other newspapers across the US.  Adpay, Inc. will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Ancestry.com Operations Inc., and will continue to be managed by its founder, Mike Heene.

“Since our first meeting, we’ve known that the Ancestry team, culture, and strategy is the perfect landing spot for us.  This is a great next step for our team, we are thrilled to be joining an organization that so clearly understands how digital platforms like ours can help newspapers grow their businesses,” said Mike Heene, founder and CEO of Adpay, Inc.  “We are excited to grow these platforms together.”

Memoriams.com joins Newspapers.com, which powers online archives, as the second newspaper-focused business in the Ancestry portfolio.

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include a variety of factors, some of which are beyond the company's control. In particular, such risks and uncertainties include the consummation and anticipated timing of the transaction between Ancestry and Adpay, Inc., the expected benefits of the proposed transaction, and the effects of the proposed transaction on Ancestry, our subscriber base, our reach, our activities to enhance subscribers' experience, our business outlook, our leadership position and our opportunities and prospects for growth.  Information concerning these and additional factors that could cause events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements is contained under the caption "Risk Factors" in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ended March 31, 2016, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 29, 2016, and in discussions in other of our Securities and Exchange Commission filings. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date and we assume no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

About Ancestry
Ancestry, the leader in family history and consumer genomics, harnesses the information found in family trees, historical records, and DNA to help people gain a new level of understanding about their lives. Ancestry has more than 2.3 million paying subscribers across its core Ancestry websites and more than 1.5 million DNA samples in the AncestryDNA database. Since 1996, more than 17 billion records have been added, and users have created more than 80 million family trees on the Ancestry flagship site and its affiliated international websites. Ancestry offers a suite of family history products including Archives, Fold3, Newspapers.com and AncestryDNA sold by its subsidiary, Ancestry.com DNA, LLC, and the AncestryHealth product, offered by its subsidiary AncestryHealth.com, LLC.