Tracing back your heritage to complete your family tree?  Or perhaps you’re searching to see if you have a celebrity cousin or a rich uncle.  With growing databases chronicling our global traits and travels, it’s getting to be quite a popular hobby.  In fact, genealogy is said to be the fastest growing hobby in North America with sites like Ancestry.com spearheading the trend.

So it’s not surprising that MyHeritage raised $25 million in a fifth round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners with the participation of existing investors Index Ventures and Accel Partners.  MyHeritage already raised a total of $49 million.

“We’re fond of consumer businesses that sell something to customers rather than push ads to them,”  Adam Fisher, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners said. “We especially appreciate consumer businesses that have mastered the freemium model or have a network effect. Those are two criteria with which we consider you need to have a sustainable business.”

The new round of funding isn’t their only news, as they’ve announced the acquisition of Geni, a former rival previously run by PayPal alumnus David Sacks.  Sack will now be joining MyHeritage’s board of directors.

MyHeritage has around 72 million users who spends an averages of eight hours on the site and log in more than 40 times.  Though they have “profiles”, they are not like the ones users have on Facebook.  It is available for free but users can only add up to 16 family members in their family tree, to add more, you need to subscribe to the service which would cost you $75 a year for the premium and $120 for premium plus, which is $10 a month.

Another company making waves is 23andMe.  The company focuses on the root of all people.  Not evil, but genetics.  The company started offering DNA testing services back in 2007 where the results were posted online to allow an assessment of inherited traits, genealogy and possible congenital risk factors.  All data are of course anonymized but earlier this month, 23andMe made the anonymized data available to the public for research purposes.  This will help in the research for studying gene abnormalities, possibly finding cures, and identifying new anomalies.  The service cost $299 and they provide interested individuals with a spit kit which will be sent back to them for analysis.

There a billions of people in the world and with people migrating to new lands for thousands of years, it’s quite hard to track where one person originally came from, let alone trace back your whole ancestry.  So with sites and services like the above mentioned, it would help people get a glimpse of where they actually came from.