Ancestry.com to Retire Five "Old" Genealogy Services

Ancestry.com announced yesterday that it will "retire" five of its services as of 5 Sep 2014. Ancestry.com's executive vice president of products, Eric Shoup, said that ending these services will allow Ancestry.com to focus on its core products and mission.

"We’re always looking to focus our efforts in a way that provide the most impact, while also delivering the best service and best product experience to users," said Shoup. "To that end, we’ve decided to retire some of our services."

The services that will be retired include:

• Genealogy.com (though the site will remain online with some content) http://www.ancestry.com/cs/faq/genealogy-faq
• Mundia.com, the worldwide family tree site http://www.ancestry.com/cs/faq/mundia-faq_en
• MyCanvas, the photo book publishing service http://www.ancestry.com/cs/faq/mycanvas-faq
• MyFamily.com, the family website service http://www.ancestry.com/cs/faq/myfamily-faq
• Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA testing     http://www.ancestry.com/cs/faq/legacy-dna-faq

Subscribers and active users of each service will receive an email with details on any refunds (if applicable) and how to retrieve their content. The links I have included above for each site will send you to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages for that service and each site will also have a retirement landing page.

I want to emphasize that the AncestryDNA (autosomal) test is not affected by the retirement of the company Legacy Y-DNA and mtDNA testing. AncestryDNA autosomal testing will continue to be available as Ancestry continues to invest in this new technology. Only the y-DNA and mtDNA tests will be retired.

If you did do a Y-DNA/mtDNA test with Ancestry, after September 5, 2014, you will no longer be able to view your Y-DNA and mtDNA results on the website, but you can download your raw DNA data prior to that time by visiting www.DNA.ancestry.com and logging in to begin the download process of that raw data. Your raw DNA data will be exported into a .csv file format, and that can be uploaded to other Y-chromosome and mtDNA testing services, and online databases.

As far as the Genealogy.com and its older GenForum messages databases, these will remain in the read-only mode. Shoup noted, "We're pleased to announce that GenForum message boards, Family Tree Maker homepages, and the most popular articles will continue to be available in a read-only format on the Genealogy.com site." This means you will be allowed to view the older messages and articles, but they cannot be changed or edited.

The following areas at Genealogy.com will be retired: All member log-in functionality will be retired, and the following pages will no longer be accessible after September 5, 2014 -- MyAccount, MyGenealogy, My Home Pages, HeritageQuest (ProQuest) content; Virtual Cemetery; Outdated and less popular help articles; and Shop.

If you had any data or content that you created on the sites closing above, you will have the ability to print or export My Trees and manually print or save additional content you've uploaded until September 5, 2014. To preserve the information you've added, you will have to log in to your account to export, print, or save your information.