The Genetic Genealogist

As announced by Mark Tucker at ThinkGenealogy and Shelly Talalay Dardashti at Tracing the Tribe, CEO of FamilyLink.com Paul Allen tweeted the following yesterday:

“Starting job description for ‘chief genealogy officer’ who will help manage GenSeek–directory of all the world’s genealogy sources.”

You can learn more about GenSeek – a comprehensive genealogy website including the Family History Catalog 2.0 – at “What is this GenSeek of which you Speak?” from ThinkGenealogy.

This is an interesting development and suggests that innovative developments in genealogy are continuing and that they can be profitable (for instance, see Geni.com’s latest round of VC).  In the past few months, FamilyLink.com, Inc. has hired a new a new president (Steve Nickle), vice president (Jim Erickson), and chief technology officer (Allan Carroll).

For those who are not familiar with FamilyLink.com, the company’s recent press releases contain a great summary:

FamilyLink.com, Inc. is a family of services that includes WorldVitalRecords.com, FamilyHistoryLink.com, WebTree.com, and the We’re Related and My Family applications on Facebook. The focus of the company is to bring families closer through innovative online services. A combined global audience of 11.5 million unique individuals visits the Web properties owned and operated by FamilyLink.com, Inc. each month to generate 28 million monthly page views. We’re Related is one of the fastest-growing social networks for genealogists as well as other family members with more than 16.5 million users. The application helps individuals find relatives on Facebook, keep in touch with family members through news and status updates, build family trees, and share photos. Those who use We’re Related actively participate in guiding the product roadmap through an online forum and direct feedback.