How Ancestry is using America’s 250th birthday as a ‘backdrop’ to tell lesser-known stories

American history is rife with stories of important figures. Some of those stories are legends, told so many times that it’s impossible to hear a historical figure’s name without thinking of a tale that goes with it. George Washington and the cherry tree myth. Benjamin Franklin and his kite. Others, though, are barely a footnote.

Throughout this year, with America’s 250’s birthday in July, familial history company Ancestry is telling some of the lesser-known stories of people who made a difference—250 of them—with a new campaign, “The Stories of US,” from its in-house brand team.

During the Golden Globes in January, the company kicked off the campaign with a 30-second spot questioning why some stories are known but others aren’t, encouraging people to dig into their own personal history. As part of that effort, Ancestry is showing up in cities across the country to highlight various people who are important to those cities with events and out-of-home advertising.

“The way that we’re thinking about America’s 250 is that it’s the backdrop,” Attica Jaques, CMO of Ancestry in the US, told Marketing Brew. “We could have told the ‘Stories of US’ anytime, right? It helps us to have grounding in terms of authentic storytelling…[Few marketers can] talk about how individual people help shape and make up America the way that we can.”

Historical spotlight: The campaign started in New York last month, spotlighting the first Black officer in the FDNY, Wesley A. Williams, for his efforts to save a family from a tenement fire on the Lower East Side in 1929. The company brought together descendants of both Williams and the family he saved.

This month, meanwhile, Ancestry went to Chicago, where the company hosted a bus tour about women like Chicago YWCA founder Mary Emerson Haven and hair care businesswoman and inventor Marjorie Stewart Joyner, among others, who were influential and “groundbreaking” in the city, “but a lot of their stories haven’t been told,” Jaques said.

Next up, the company will head to Los Angeles in May. Ancestry’s team of story producers and genealogists spend time researching history and with this campaign it’s a matter of picking when to highlight those people. While it can be difficult given the breadth of stories available—the company has “over 70 billion records,” Jaques noted—the ability to connect those stories to specific cultural moments can make it more meaningful.

Family stories: American history is complicated, and celebrating that history can be tricky, particularly in today’s political environment. This is why Ancestry is focused on familial stories in its approach to America 250 marketing.

“Even as America may ebb and flow in its complexity, I think we remain very steadfast and really being about family history,” Jaques said. “It’s a platform that is allowing people to find their family history, no matter how complex or simple or straightforward.”

That approach makes sense to Eunice Shin, founder of brand consultancy The Elume Group, who sees Ancestry’s approach as “deeply human.”

“Right now, the market overall, the world overall, is looking for deeply human stories and longing to connect to that,” she said. “There’s nothing more emotional than that, right?”

Update 03/28/26: This story has been edited to update a stat.