MyHeritage, the popular online family history network, announced today that it has acquired Geni.com, a pioneer in collaborative family tree building with its focus on creating the World Family Tree.

The acquisition extends MyHeritage’s network to 72 million registered users, 1.5 billion profiles and 27 million family trees internationally.

Geni.com will continue to operate as a separate brand based out of its California office, and the services of MyHeritage and Geni.com will initially run independently. MyHeritage plans to give respective users the option to collaborate on family history research by enabling two-way information flows between the sites.

Users of both sites will be able to discover relatives and new ancestral connections through MyHeritage’s Smart Matching technology, which finds common matches between family trees. In addition, MyHeritage will apply its recently launched Record Matching technology—matching historical records such as birth, death, census and immigration records—to individuals in Geni.com family trees.

In addition to its acquisition, MyHeritage also announced its $25 million funding round to be used to boost growth of its historical content services and expand its commercial operations worldwide.

UPDATED: Geni CEO Noah Tutak announces immediate benefits to Geni.com users:

• Free unlimited profile adding—All users can add as many profiles as they’d like to their tree without upgrading to a paid account. There are no limits to the size of a user’s tree.
• Free Merging—All users can now merge duplicate profiles in their tree (privacy and permission rules still apply).
• Free relationship paths—Users can discover their relationship to historical figures and celebrities, and even distant relatives.
• Free family tree chart downloads—All users can now download a high-quality chart of their family tree to their computer at no charge.
• No ads—Ads have been removed to provide users with a cleaner, less distracting interface.
• More privacy—Living people who have not joined Geni will become private and will not be searchable on Google.