Enhancing Education

AncestryClassroom™ formerly AncestryK12

Empowering the Next Generation of History Makers Through Family History Research

 

Understanding the past is a powerful tool for building resilience, connection, and understanding for all ages.

 

At Ancestry, we have a long-term commitment to enhancing education. This is why we created AncestryClassroom, a no-cost program that provides resources and access to content from the U.S. collection of Ancestry, Fold3.com, and Newspapers.com.

 

For nearly a decade, we’ve offered these AncestryClassroom services – reaching more than 9 million students.

 

 

In partnership with organizations like Facing History & Ourselves, we’ve developed a robust collection of resources, professional learning tools for educators, and Ancestry historical record collections to help students learn more about themselves, navigate the world around them, and become more resilient.

 

 

Leveraging resources from AncestryClassroom, high school teacher Keira Murphy created a meaningful genealogy curriculum that helps students at St. Edward’s in Vero Beach, Florida, find their personal places in history. With support from AncestryProGenealogists, St. Edward’s students learned the basics of genealogy, including how to search and cite historical documents. They gained lifelong interpersonal skills, such as how to interview relatives and local community members.

 

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I believe teaching genealogy research skills to young students is critical to their development as a curious and conscientious student. AncestryClassroom resources provide excellent readings, lessons and webinars to enhance genealogy or general history discussions in the classroom. Ancestry’s K-12 resources have helped me inspire my students for many years.”

Keira Murphy, St. Edward’s Teacher JumpStart Genealogy Founder

Cultural Preservation

 

Preservation

Ancestry is working to preserve important records that are in danger of being lost.

 

Every generation deserves the opportunity to know what and who came before them, but many important historical documents are in danger of being forgotten, overlooked, or destroyed. As part of our Community Impact Program, Ancestry has committed $3 million to acquiring, digitizing, and making at-risk records available for free by 2025. Below are just a few of our most recent philanthropic digitization initiatives:

 

  • We made the world’s largest digitized and searchable collection of Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedman’s Bank records available for free at www.Ancestry.com/Freedmens. This addition of more than 3.5 million records has and will continue to help descendants of previously enslaved people in the U.S. learn more about their families and make meaningful family history breakthroughs.
  • We digitized and made searchable – for free – 19 million global Holocaust and Nazi persecution- related records from the Arolsen Archives Collection. We also announced a new partnership with USC Shoah Foundation to publish nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies. Both collections are available and searchable on www.ancestry.com/alwaysremember
  • We’ve released the Danish West Indies collection, which houses more than one million records sharing unique insights into the lives of Black people who were enslaved, then legally freed, in the Danish West Indies.
The World Memory Project

The World Memory Project is a free, online, searchable resource for information about victims and survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution during World War II. It was created through a partnership between Ancestry and The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, with software and processes developed by the Ancestry World Archives Project. In 2022, more than 120,000 additional records were indexed and added to the database.

 

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I will never forget the faces of the individuals who have shared their stories – a 3-year- old sent to London, a husband devoted to sharing his wife’s story – as I helped them search through records and build their trees so their lives and those of their ancestors could be preserved for future generations.”

Anna Fechter, Community Operations Manager with Ancestry

Supporting Employees & Their Causes

 

Difference Makers

Providing employees with the time, resources, and incentives for giving back.
 

As a human-centered company, Ancestry is passionate about supporting our communities. With more than 1,400 employees eager to make a real difference, Ancestry not only encourages volunteering, but provides paid Volunteer Time Off, resources, and programs to make it happen.
 

Volunteering Our Time & Resources

Ancestry provides all full-time employees with 16 hours of paid time off to volunteer. With Volunteer Time Off (VTO), employees can contribute their time and talents to recognized nonprofit organizations that support the causes they are most passionate about.
 

Each year Ancestry employees can also donate one AncestryDNA kit and one World Explorer membership to a nonprofit of their choice for use in a raffle, giveaway, or auction.

Global Days Of Service

Ancestry hosts quarterly Global Days of Service featuring hands on volunteer opportunities including packing backpacks, planting trees, and indexing records. Aligned to our impact focus areas, employees volunteered to protect and preserve at-risk history, empower the next generation of history makers, and create a more sustainable and inclusive future for all.

“

Thank you Ancestry for implementing a Global Week of Service for employees to take time to give back. It was wonderful to spend part of my day today with colleagues putting together school supply kits for underserved youth through the Kids in Need Foundation. I enjoyed sharing this activity with my son who is learning to give back at an early age.”

Kate Eyre Sandfoss, Director of product commercialization at Ancestry