15 October 2017

Rootsweb's Future?

"We will be discontinuing the Rootsweb Surname List and Genealogy Forum features on Tuesday Oct 24, 2017."

That's the announcement appearing at the top of the Rootsweb home page at http://home.rootsweb.ancestry.com/.

How much will disappear? As the word Forum does not appear anywhere else on that page the extent of what's being dropped is not clear to me. Mailing Lists? Message Boards?

Use of Rootsweb, as reflected in this chart of the number of messages posted on ROOTS-L, has been in terminal decline for years.

You have a week to search and perhaps rediscover any information you originally found through Rootsweb, the pioneer genealogy social network.

10 comments:

T said...

AACK!! NO! NO! NO! I use it all the time! It's where I find stuff that everyone else knew 10 years ago and I'm finding it now! This can't be happening! First the god awful redesign of ancestry family trees, then the even worse redesign of findagrave and now this. Poor ancestry, going broke keeping all these resources usable.

Gal B said...

I never use it anymore, once Ancestry took over. Will have to notify others, and bookmark a couple of thing.

This shows ancestry's devotion, not to genealogy, but self-promotion.

Gail B said...

I haven't used Rootsweb in years since Ancestry too it over. Just goes to show that Ancestry is not interested in genealogy, but just self-promotion.

Gail B said...

I haven't used Rootsweb since ancestry took over. Will need to bookmark some things and notify others. Just goes to show that Ancestry is not interested in genealogy, but self-promotion.

Gail B said...

I haven't used Rootsweb since Ancestry too over. It just shows that Ancestry is not interest in genealogy, but self-promotion.

Gail Roger said...

I've said this in my presentations: the Rootsweb Archive often contains answers you can't find anywhere else. This is a loss.

Anonymous said...

OMG NO!!!!! I was just using the forum, or bulletin board, or whatever it's called now, over the weekend to follow a long and complicated discussion of a particular genealogical question that has been an issue for years. Only a couple of months ago, following a different discussion on another family helped me understand how a particular piece of misinformation arose, and why it's wrong (somebody attached facts and relationships of a father to his son because they didn't realize there were two generations of men and women with the same names living in the same small community). So, OK, I don't use it every day, but then I don't use the NEHGS Register or the NYGBS Record every day either. But just like those resources, that old Rootsweb site is full of really useful stuff that you really need to have available on your bookshelf. Ancestry's whole problem with the site is it's FREE and they promised to keep it that way as part of the deal under which they took it over from the folks who did all the work of collecting and posting all the valuable information the site contained without getting paid for all their thousands of hours of hard work to make the knowledge hidden in hard to reach local communities available to all as a public service. Just because it can't be "monetized" it has no value to Ancestry.com, so let.'s go ahead and destroy it, NOT!

Kathryn Schultz said...

They only give a week's notice. This is unconscionable!

Kim said...

I use this site frequently...going to have to get in there and pull as much information as I can

Anonymous said...

FYI: This is what the Rootsweb helpdesk has to say about that notice.

rwsupport@ancestry.com
To
Monday, October 16, 2017 6:09 PM
Click to View Full HTML


Dear [G]

Thank you for contacting RootsWeb in regard to the notice on the main page of the site.

We appreciate your concern that some information is being removed from the site. We will do all that we can to answer your questions. The Message Boards are not being removed. The " Genealogy Forum " references a web page maintained by the " Golden Gate Genealogy Forum ". It is accessible from the link below. They are moving their page.

http://genforum.rootsweb.ancestry.com/


If there is anything else with which we might assist you, please let us know.

Kevin
RootsWeb Support Team
http://rootsweb.ancestry.com