15 Companies That Care About Your Family History
An Appreciation of Ancestry, Finding Your Roots, Meminto and many more…
by Mark Noonan
Products, services, TV shows, and Apps that care about your family history are rare. When you locate one, it’s important to appreciate it. Whether you want to research your family tree, organize home movies and photos, or just unwind and watch two Iowa guys explore Americans’ most treasured possessions, there’s something for everyone in our celebration of fifteen companies that care about your family history.
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Sometimes bigger is better.
Ancestry, headquartered in Lehi, Utah, is the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world. Ancestry DNA testing is now available in 128 countries with a network of over 25 million users.
Mormons care about their church and family history. Founded in 1990 by Paul Brent Allen and Dan Taggart, two BYU graduates, they started out offering Mormon publications on floppy disks to help church members research their ancestors.
Attention to detail and amassing of enormous data makes Ancestry a logical first step if you want to learn about yourself, and your ancestors.
Currently, Ancestry is owned by Blackstone and valued at over $4.7 billion.
A litany of websites and acquisitions fall under the Ancestry canopy:
But the two main components of Ancestry remain:
Family Tree (Genealogy)
DNA testing
Ancestry Genealogy Subscription Packages start at $119 for 6 months.
AncestryDNA Packages start at $99.
Think Ancestry, but instead of Mormons, Israelis.
MyHeritage was founded in 2003 by Israeli entrepreneur Gilad Japhet (who continues to serve as CEO) from his family farmhouse in Bnei Atarot, Israel.
Fast forward to 2020: MyHeritage and its subsidiaries have major control of world genealogy data. Currently, MyHeritage is owned by Francisco Partners and valued at over $600 million.
Similar to Ancestry, MyHeritage has acquired or partnered with:
Family Tree Legends
GenCircles
Kindo
OSN Group
SNPedia
Filae
MyHeritage created two innovative products that garnered strong social media attention:
DeepStory - make family photos speak.
AI Time Machine - create AI avatars and travel through history.
MyHeritage Genealogy Subscription Package starts at $129/year.
MyHeritage DNA Kits start at: $89.
If Ancestry and MyHeritage had a TV show baby it would be Dr. Gates’ program. The PBS show combines the two main components of Ancestry and MyHeritage, using traditional genealogical research and DNA testing, to trace each celebrity’s family tree as far back as possible, to find the roots.
Finding Your Roots premiered on PBS in 2012, hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. In each episode, a pair of celebrities receive their own personal “Book of Life” which contains information discovered about the guest’s genealogy by researchers alongside extensive DNA testing to locate links and long lost relatives and unknown relations.
To see world-famous celebrities genuinely surprised and moved by the findings of Dr. Gates’ team is unlike any other program on television and shows the six degrees of separation interconnectedness among all of us and also makes you want to write a check to PBS immediately to keep these types of shows produced and on-air.
It is fascinating to see reactions to uncovered family history, the positive and the troublesome parts from the past, and cousins you never knew existed.
Show airs on PBS - new episodes: Tuesdays.
In 2017 Founder Albert Brückmann started Meminto from his German hometown to capture his grandfather’s stories with the Memorial Book, which allows relatives and friends to record a lasting memory of a loved one in retrospect.
With Meminto’s free mobile App and website anyone can capture memories and stories from any lifetime event - Memorial, Wedding, Childhood, Travel - and turn those stories into beautiful book form.
Interactive technology even allows photographs to come alive. By combining an easy-to-use App with 9 book offerings and integrating audio and video into the process, Meminto blends the best of the past (the printed word) with the latest cutting-edge ideas (AI) to deliver powerful results.
Easily add videos and photos to your account. Embed audio and video into your book through QR codes to make a virtual pop-up experience.
There’s a wonderful free make-a-small e-book option if you’d like to dip your toe into the Meminto waters and take a test drive. The Meminto team responds quickly so feel confident to reach out with any questions, they will be happy to help you choose the right book.
Pricing: $79 per book.
Put a frame around it.
The easiest way to take a picture and get it from your phone to on your wall.
In 2015, Founder Adam Weiss took a great picture of his friends holding hands in California. He then set out to print and frame it as a gift. At the time, easier said than done. So Adam built a website and App that would make the process simple, fun, and affordable.
Today, Keepsake frames all pictures in the USA on luster paper and delivers hundreds of thousands of photographs to adorn customer walls. They remain the highest-rated framing app in the App Store because they KISS: keep it simple, stupid:
Download the App.
Pick your photograph.
Choose your frame.
Shipped straight to your doorstep.
Pricing for frames begins at $29.
If Finding Your Roots discovers the history of people, then American Pickers locates people’s stuff and finds the story behind every treasured piece of rusty gold.
Mike Wolfe & Frank Fritz hopped in a beat-up van over 20 years ago and started filming themselves visiting fellow collectors/junkers/antique dealers to negotiate deals and bundle as much as possible.
The History Channel program debuted in 2010 and quickly became a phenomenon.
Blowing up the Antiques Roadshow model, Mike & Frank were two Kerouacs of “crap,” on the road all over America to meet amazing humans hoarding incredible collectibles.
Armed with their “Wanted” flyer, the show follows their exploits to buy (“pick”) unique items for resale at their shops: Wolfe's Antique Archaeology shop in LeClaire, Iowa, and Frank Fritz Finds, upriver in Savanna, Illinois.
The best friends explore homes, barns, sheds, outbuildings, even an outhouse if there's a sign on the wall! They call upon serious collectors, hoarders, and family members who have inherited overwhelming amounts of stuff that they don't know what to do with. Wolfe has a particular interest in vintage motorcycles, antique bicycles, Volkswagen buses, and rare signs. Fritz has a fondness for antique toys, vintage oil cans, little Honda’s, and a special love for peanut-related items (Mr. Peanut). They have purchased rare Ace and Royal Pioneer motorcycles, a British phone booth, and even Aerosmith's original touring van.
Mike and Frank know it’s not really about the stuff, but the people, stories, and memories items conjure up from the near past.
Show airs on The History Channel – new episodes: Wednesdays.
You need a will.
No, really, you do.
And maybe a trust too.
Trust & Will was founded in 2017 by Cody Barbo, Daniel Goldstein, and Brian Lamb to make the process simple, easy, and entirely on-line.
In 2019, they completed the first electronic Will (eWill) in US history.
Today, they’ve turned a boring, tedious process into a streamlined operation that anyone can understand and accomplish in as little as fifteen minutes.
No more excuses.
Will pricing starts at $199.
Remarkable memorial diamonds.
Sorry to surprise you, but memorial jewelry is nothing new. The Victorians were putting loved one’s hair into lockets and Ancient Romans rocked memory rings.
Eterneva takes cremated ashes or hair from your loved one or beloved pet and turns a small amount into a beautiful lab-made personal diamond.
After losing a dear friend and mentor, Eterneva Co-founder Adelle Archer found memorial jewelry options underwhelming at best. So she and partner Garrett Ozar set out to create a more meaningful experience, a better product, and the most desired outcome: re-connecting with your loved one.
Eterneva sends you a welcome kit. You add a small amount of cremated ashes (or hair) to it and send the box back to them. Their lab grows a diamond specifically for you.
Every diamond produced is as unique as the individual it’s made from and hand cut by masters.
Choose a color that reminds you of their eyes or that represents their one-in-a-million personality. As the final touch, engrave their name on the Diamond’s edge.
You now have a memorial ring, necklace, pendant, or earrings to wear and keep that special person close to your heart.
Diamond pricing starts at $2,999.
Take human remains: turn to compost.
The circle of life.
Headquartered in Washington state and founded by Katrina Spade in 2017, Recompose was the first company in the United States to offer human composting. An alternative to traditional burial or cremation, the service converts human bodies into soil through a 30 day process known as natural organic reduction.
After Washington legalized natural organic reduction in 2020, Recompose opened its first facility during Covid-19 in winter 2020 outside of Seattle, Washington.
Currently, 34 vessels operate from this location with plans to license the technology across the nation as more state governments pass legislation allowing human composting.
Pricing is $7,000.
The world’s largest adoption reunion registry.
"The idea of creating an adoption reunion registry came to me when I was trying to help a friend find his biological family. Due to his circumstances, he wasn’t allowed access to the adoption records. This meant a dead end for him. It inspired me to create one, central, global adoption reunion registry where mutually consenting people can find each other instantly. The success of Adopted.com has been extraordinary."
- Katharine, founder of Adopted.com
19 years later: over 1.1 million profiles created.
Even with communication advancements and endless social media networking options at our disposal, locating an adopted child can still prove difficult for adoptees and birth parents alike.
Adopted.com builds a community that supports those searching for biological relatives.
A helpful solution without the hassles of government agencies, and before hiring a private investigator, Adopted.com also values privacy by allowing information to be exchanged without divulging identity.
If you’ve used AncestryDNA or MyHeritageDNA and engaged with Adopted.com but the results aren’t quite enough, enlisting the aid of Search Angels may be your next step.
After completing his own birth family search, Founder Joel Chambers took his expertise and turned it into a non-profit organization to assist others with genealogy and DNA test results to unravel the past and uncover family history.
Helping others find their birth families is an incredible philanthropic gift. Each volunteer has extensive experience working with adoptees and the adoption community, with the goal of bringing your search to a meaningful conclusion.
Remember way back in 2007? Apple debuted the iPhone, Netflix launched streaming, and Legacybox Founders Adam Boeselager and Nick Macco wondered what would happen to all the footage trapped on VHS tapes and film reels.
From a two-man band in a garage with a bunch of VCRs, today Legacybox is the largest and most-trusted digitizing company in the world: they preserve more than 700,000 items each week!
Call them up and get connected to an actual person. Every item is still digitized by hand.
That clip of your kid’s first steps.
The old wedding video.
The grainy vacation footage from DisneyWorld…
All can be easily preserved at the Legacybox facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Starter Box Pricing is $36.
Loss is hard.
Grief comes in many forms.
Empathy can help.
Founded in 2020 by Ron Gura and Yonatan Bergman, Empathy is an App and website dedicated to assisting families through their toughest times by focusing on compassionate care and changing the way the world deals with loss.
Most of us are not prepared for the challenges of losing someone close to us.
Bereaved families need a holistic support system that covers emotional, administrative, legal, and financial challenges posed to us during a time when heads are spinning.
The platform provides support across grief, estate settlement, benefits and probate — making it a bit less hard, for everyone, every day.
Over the past 32 years, Donate Life America and the Donate Life Community have registered 170 Million organ, eye and tissue donors in the United States.
Donate Life America is a nonprofit organization working to increase the number of donated organs, eyes and tissues available to save and heal lives through transplantation while developing a culture where donation is embraced as a fundamental human responsibility.
Become a donor. It’s quick, easy, and you can directly help someone in need with your amazing selfless choice.
