Spectrum Equity Investors has led a $300 million investment to acquire a majority interest in Provo Utah-based The Generations Network (the parent company of Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com and other sites) according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

What that means for our sister site, MyFamily.com's Douglas Family Web site, is unclear, but my guess is the Douglas Family Web Site will likely continue, since it has to do with revenue for Ancestry.com. I also think our planned move to MyFamily.com 2.0 will continue, as well.

The company that bought Ancestry.com has quite a portfolio, which you can see here.

All I can say for sure at this point is that online genealogy is Big Business. I wonder how much money Ancestry.com lost by siphoning off information from private genealogy web sites. Enough to effect a sale of the company? Who's to know?

If anyone doubted that online genealogy is Big Business, this article should shed a little light. It wasn't long ago that [url=http://legacynews.typepad.com/legacy_news/2007/08/ancestrycom---l.html]Ancestry.com siphoned genealogy info from personal web sites[/url] to create a "Super Database" which was made available to the world-at-large for a fee. [url=http://legacynews.typepad.com/legacy_news/2007/08/ancestrys-respo.html]Ancestry.com has since kind of "apologized"[/url] and pulled the database, but the damage had already been done.

Which leads to the question: If you have a personal family web site, how much should you make available for viewing by non-family members?