Records are at the heart of every story found on Ancestry. These documents not only reveal valuable information about the lives our ancestors lived, but pieced together, they create a vivid picture of who our ancestors were. The more records you uncover, the greater your understanding of who your ancestor was and what their life was like.
This is at the heart of our new series of TV ads in the UK, where we hope to show how records discovered on Ancestry can be used to bring your backstory to life.
With so many facts and so many discoveries to be made on Ancestry, it’s often hard to select just one story to tell. With this in mind, we didn’t want to select just one piece of information or single discovery to focus on in our latest series of commercials. Instead, we deliberately selected real moments of history combined with real records to inspire the creation of a set of stories that represent the full range and depth of discoveries that people can make on Ancestry. By combining these records with scenes and imagery selected from public archives, we have aimed to recreate these historical stories in a compelling and emotive way.
Each collage of records and imagery culminates in a final portrait of a single person – a visual metaphor for the many details that help build out our ancestors’ stories. The more records that contribute to this portrait, the clearer the picture becomes.
People don’t discover isolated facts on Ancestry, they discover a huge range of details and stories that piece together to bring their family story to life. The technique of using real records that are ordered into a narrative, represents the journey of discovery a person could make. By setting these stories in real moments in time, we hope to help people imagine the role their ancestors played in history.
With so many fascinating stories waiting to be uncovered in Ancestry’s records, we hope this new series of commercials truly inspires people to bring their backstory to life.