Ancestry.com acquires Adpay, Inc.

Ancestry.com LLC, the largest provider of family history and personal DNA testing, announced 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, senior vice president 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 percent 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 Heene.  "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.