Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Findmypast Acquires Twile

I received this information from Findmypast today:

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FINDMYPAST ACQUIRES GENEALOGY STARTUP TWILE -
WINNER OF TWO ROOTSTECH INNOVATION AWARDS


Leading British family history website, Findmypast, has announced their acquisition of genealogy startup Twile, creators of the visual family history timeline and winner of two RootsTech innovation awards.

The acquisition reflects Findmypast’s drive to innovate and enhance customers’ family history experience by providing them with new ways to share their family stories.

Twile enables family historians to create interactive timelines with their family memories and set them against the context of world history. Twile provides new and engaging ways of telling your family’s story via beautiful infographics  and other visualizations. 

Twile and Findmypast have been strategic partners since 2016 and have a shared mission of making family history more engaging for the entire family.

In the future, Twile’s storytelling features will be available on Findmypast, enabling users to automatically display their family history research in a media-rich timeline. Combined with Findmypast’s unrivalled collection of British and Irish records, these new features will enable users to share their discoveries in new and exciting ways.

The Twile team will continue to develop and maintain Twile and there are no plans to change the features and services Twile users currently enjoy. Twile co-founder, Paul Brooks, will be overseeing all future integration work and regular updates will be shared with Twile subscribers.

Paul Brooks, co-founder of Twile said: “This is a really exciting development for Twile. We’ve worked closely with Findmypast over the last two years in our mission to help families share their history. I’m looking forward to working even more closely as we develop Twile into the future.”

Tamsin Todd, CEO of Findmypast said: “We’re excited to bring the innovative experiences that Twile has created to even more customers, making it easier and more engaging to create and share your family history.” 

Findmypast (previously DC Thomson Family History) is the British-owned world leader in online family history with over 18 million registered users across its family of brands, which include Findmypast, Genes Reunited, the British Newspaper Archive and Twile.

Its lead brand, also called Findmypast, is the home of the world’s most comprehensive online collection of British and Irish records, including:

        The largest online collection of UK parish records
        Twice the number of Irish records available on any other site
        The British Library’s vast collection of historical newspapers
        The exclusive Catholic Heritage Archive, a groundbreaking initiative that aims to digitize the historical records of the Catholic Church in North America, Britain and Ireland for the very first time.

Findmypast is committed to making discoveries in the British Isles easier than ever before. It combines the best of British and Irish data with the knowledge of in-house experts to provide a unique family history experience that guides researchers through every step of their journey.

For more information on how Findmypast is enhancing the experiences of family historians worldwide, visit: www.findmypast.co.uk

About Twile

Twile is an interactive timeline made up of photos and milestones – such as births, marriages and deaths – which tells the story of your family from your earliest known ancestor to the youngest member of your family. Genealogists can import a family tree from their existing research tool (eg Findmypast) to automatically generate their Twile timeline.

Based in Doncaster, Twile was started in 2013 by Paul Brooks and Kelly Marsden. Both with young families they were looking to give their children a record of their early years and a knowledge of their ancestors. While the website is aimed primarily at family historians, it is also designed to encourage the rest of the family to add their own, more recent content.

Since its beginnings, Twile has been backed by Creative England (who bring capital through the Government’s Regional Growth Fund) and a number of UK angel investors, including Lee Strafford, one of the original co-founders of Plusnet, which sold to BT Group in 2007.

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Copyright (c) 2018, Randall J. Seaver

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