• by Aaron Baar , July 2, 2009

People love a great story, and Ancestry.com is encouraging people to find out more about their own -- and their relatives' -- stories via a new year-long advertising campaign. The television effort shows members of Ancestry.com's Web community and their family history connections.

One commercial shows Jim Lane, who found information about his paternal grandmother -- who was unknown to Lane's father -- through Ancestry.com. "To introduce your father to his own mother, it's a little miracle," Lane says in the commercial. The commercial closes with the tagline: "Who will you discover."

Other stories featured in the campaign include a man who discovers that his great-grandfather fought for the U.S. in World War I (rather than for Germany, as his family had long believed), a woman tracing her passion for cooking to her chef grandfather (she later meets a cousin, with whom she opens a restaurant), and a woman who tracks down information about her father who was lost at sea after splitting with her mother.

"These miraculous discoveries are happening every day," said Ancestry.com Vice President of Marketing Cheyenne Richards in a statement. "We literally went through thousands of incredible member-submitted stories before we chose these five. That's the inspiration behind our new 'My Story' campaign -- to convey how life-changing a family history discovery can be."

The television ads -- which are targeted at adults 45 and older (when, according to Richards, one's curiosity about family history really sets in) -- will run on cable networks such as AMC, CNN, Fox News, History Channel, Lifetime Movie Network and Hallmark, among others. An online campaign featuring banner ads asking "Who will you discover?" is also part of the campaign, which will run for at least the next 12 months.