Difference Between Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com

Ancestry.com vs Genealogy.com

Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com are two websites that are involved  in developing family trees. Many of us are interested in who and what our ancestors were and if there were people of repute or nobility in our family tree. Now if there are no great story tellers in a family, it is virtually impossible to trace your roots beyond 1-2 generations and it becomes frustrating as there is no other source to tell anything about your ancestors. Thankfully this task has been taken up by two websites on the internet that are known as Ancestry.com and Genealogy .com. These two are performing basically the same job but people are often confused as to which site’s services they should utilize as they do not know the difference between Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com. Below is a brief comparison of the two sites to let readers make the more suitable choice.

Ancestry.com

This is a venture of Ancestry.com Inc that was established in 1983 in Utah. Before 1983, the company was better known as The Generations Network. It has a cluster of websites all dealing in services pertaining to family matters. It is a membership based website where you need to pay a subscription fee that is annual to conduct any search about genealogy of a person. The subscription rates vary from $155 to $300. The site takes pride in having an extensive database of people that goes back to as early as 1790. This database comprises more than 5 billion records. The records are mainly about people inside US, but new records have been added and now people in Canada and other European countries can also conduct searches.

Genealogy.com

This is a research based website that is owned by A&E Networks. In 2003, the site was bought by MFamily.com that belongs to the group of Ancestry.com. This is also a subscription based service where a person is allowed to conduct a search to trace his ancestry using the extensive database of people after paying an annual subscription that is currently $70-$200. Its database is made up of United States Public Records. A person is guided through his ancestry if he is not aware of the facts and is also given tutorials to conduct the search. The user has the option of creating his family tree and then adds on information as and when he gets new one.

Difference between Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com

Talking about the differences, it is clear that ancestry.com is more expensive of the two genealogy websites. As far as database is concerned, Ancestry.com scores over Genealogy.com as its database covers many other countries beside US such as Europe, Canada, UK, Ireland, Sweden, and even some Asian countries like China. On the other hand, Genealogy.com has a rather limited database that covers only the US.

If your ancestors settled in the US and are of some other descent, it is difficult to know about them using Genealogy because of its limited database. In such cases, it is better to go with Ancestry.com. There are users who have subscribed to both the websites and have found that they got more detailed information about their ancestry from ancestry.com than they got with Genealogy.com.

Initially, the two websites were competing with each other, but since Genealogy.com was bought over by the group that also has Ancestry.com under its wings, the two websites are simply products of a single parent company.