Case Study: AmericanAncestors achieves faster, more scalable search with Elastic

A Fast, Satisfying Search Experience with AmericanAncestors.org

AmericanAncestors.org, the online family history research site of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, needed a faster, more flexible search experience for its 250,000+ members. Its older SQL-based approach and early Elasticsearch setup had become slow, unstable, and hard to manage, making it difficult to search more than 1.4 billion names and millions of historical pages efficiently. Elastic’s Elasticsearch Service was used to address these challenges.

Elastic helped AmericanAncestors.org optimize its clusters, improve security, and add monitoring with Kibana while reducing administration overhead. With Elastic’s support, the team fixed slow queries, improved sharding, and streamlined indexing, resulting in search that was 2–3 times faster, 60% less disk usage, and 50% less CPU usage. The system also handled a 400% traffic spike smoothly, and the overall solution cost 25% less than the previous setup.

AmericanAncestors

Don LeClair

Associate Director of Database Search and Systems