Business Wire, October 28, 2019: “Today, Ancestry^®, the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, is releasing the new Newspapers.com Obituary Collection and announcing an upgrade to its U.S. Obituary Collection, adding to what is now the world’s largest, searchable digital archive of over 262 million worldwide obituaries and death announcements, containing almost 1 billion searchable family members. “Obituaries are one of the most powerful and useful records for family tree building. They help novices get started and more advanced members unlock new clues in their family stories,” said Nat Natarajan, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Ancestry^Ⓡ. “We wanted to make it as easy and efficient as possible for members to search our millions of obituary records, but no existing tool met our standards. So our team of data scientists and engineers used AI to create our own innovative models unlike anything else currently available.” Using new sophisticated artificial intelligence technology, Ancestry updated its collection of US Obituaries by combing through millions of digital obituaries to key names, relationships and other facts so members can now easily search these records with just one click. And in the case of the Newspapers.com Obituary Collection, Ancestry data scientists developed a way to first locate individual obituaries in newspaper images among other articles and ads so the family history information could then be extracted and point users to the original newspaper page. By expanding and simplifying search capabilities, Ancestry continues to grow and give members access to the largest collections of digitized records available. The expansion of digitized obituary records allows consumers to fill in the gaps of an ancestor’s life story that may have been lost or unknown through the generations. This powerful connection can help bridge not just the past, but the present, by sparking meaningful connections and conversations among immediate family members as they learn important information about their ancestors…”