Rootsweb.com -- UPDATE

[HeiressofBickworth]

Last edited Wed Apr 9, 2014, 08:56 PM - Edit history (1)

For any of you who use Rootsweb.com: I used this database around 1:30 this morning. By 6:00 this afternoon when I got back to researching, I find that Rootsweb is now behind an Ancestry.com pay-wall.

I was aware that Ancestry purchased Rootsweb some time ago, but it had remained a free access site until sometime today.

Be forwarned: Ancestry bought Find-A-Grave last September. I'm sure we'll soon find THAT behind an Ancestry pay-wall, too.

Also note that their "free 14-day trial" uses that same-old scam of giving them your credit card which they PROMISE they won't charge until after the 14-day trial is over. The way this scam usually works is that you will spend months trying to cancel the "free" trial all the while your credit card is being charged monthly. We usually see this scam on those "free" credit report websites.

UPDATE: A friend of mine received the following response from Ancestry.com:
"We are having issues with Rootsweb directing members to Ancestry.com. This problem has been reported and is currently being worked on. At the present time it appears to be accessible with the Internet Explorer and Google Chrome Internet Browsers, but not with Fire Fox. There are still unresolved problems being encountered with all of the browsers however. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as this is resolved."

I use Fire Fox and was able to access Rootsweb today WITHOUT being directed to Ancestry.

[kickysnana]

1. So sorry to hear this.

Rootsweb was born from the blood, sweat, tears, voluntary and donations from USNET news groups at the dawn of the www. USENET newsgroups were developed by an employee ancestry club at the Rand Corporation. The servers that were developed for it were at one time the second largest on the web behind AOL. Rootsweb was taken over by Ancestry, which was controversial, but they assured the community it was supposed to remain free but Ancestry was sold again a bit ago.

You were supposed to be able to remove your information too. I wonder if that is still true. I transcribed some sources for it.

Really sad ending to an open sharing research site.

[shraby]

2. That's why when Ancestry started hosting rootsweb sites, I bailed from

usgenweb. They also started hosting those county sites and the head mucky muck from usgenweb made a secret deal with Ancestry. None of the county coordinators, or state coordinators were allowed to know the particulars. I took my site and went independent...been that way since.

[AverageJoe90]

3. Unfortunately, it looks like the recent DDOS attack.....

May have just wiped out whatever was on there.....and I'm afraid it'll probably take a long time to put it all back together.

Edit: Well, not all appears to be lost; at least some of the links to individual family tree pages are still OK, thank goodness.

[HeiressofBickworth]

4. I've been working on my trees this evening

and haven't found anything on Rootsweb, even the entries I found there before. Fortunately, Rootsweb isn't my only resource as I have a number of others. Rootsweb, I've found, is good for listing titles individuals held in life -- I have a lot of 13th century entries.
It appears that other Ancestry-owned websites are up and running, but not Rootsweb.

[csziggy]

5. A tip for using a trial membership with Ancestry.com

I did this when I first got started:
1) Call them, don't sign up online.
2) Prearrange the termination date. This way, you don't have to call to stop the membership and prevent them from charging.
3) If you decide you want to continue, call again AFTER the termination date. They will be anxious to get you hooked back up and offer really good deals.

In my case, when I first signed up, I had a coupon for a massive discount for three months. I didn't want to have to remember what the end date was and had heard the horror stories about not being able to contact Ancestry to cancel. The customer representative who talked to me offered the prearranged termination date. It worked - on that date I tried to sign in (as I thought, I forgot the date my membership ran out) and couldn't.

I called in, and they gave me 50% off a regular annual membership so I got sucked back in but again I set the prearranged termination date. The next year I called and they gave me a great deal off the World membership - which I needed because I was begining to research past when my ancestors got to American and I had Canadian relatives I needed to find. As long as they think you might just bail on them - which is easy to do with the preset termination dates - they will offer discounts to keep you.

Meanwhile, I am tempted to try out Macavo.com. It's supposed to be free for access to all the records, but you get limited search capabilities unless you pay for a membership. So far, I've only signed up for the free version but haven't looked at much yet.

[HeiressofBickworth]

6. I've managed for over 40 years

without using Ancestry to any great extent. I had a 3 month membership to Ancestry several years back -- before they did their automatic renewal. I let it drop after the 3 months. In the beginning, I went to the library every Saturday and stayed from when they opened until when they closed. The Seattle Public Library has a very good genealogy section. A lot of the public records (birth, death, marriage) were obtained by letter, enclosing a check "not to exceed" a specific dollar amount. I've taken a couple of long road trips in pursuit of graveyards, libraries, courthouses. One trip was about 7,000 miles in 30 days and I did it by myself. Then for a while, state records were becoming available on-line -- until Ancestry made a deal and now those records are behind a pay-wall. The Social Security Death Index used to be easily available but now is behind pay-walls, not only with Ancestry but with other sites as well. If I really need to check on a record that I can't find through other means, I can use Ancestry at our local library for free. Our local library also has World Vital Records available from home computer for free. I use that for Census work.

There are websites that contain results of research that I would have never been able to do myself either because of the overseas travel require and/or lack of language skills to decipher. For example, for old English (or other European) records, I use www.ourfamilytree.org. What I particularly like about that site is that people who submit information do so on a collaborative basis so there is only one entry per individual. Not like Ancestry or Rootsweb where there are a dozen entries for one person, often with conflicting information. I can't tell you the number of times on Ancestry or Rootsweb, the parent is listed as being born 20 years AFTER the child. I even saw one where the parents, both mother and father, were listed as born over 80 years before the child. The information is obviously wrong, but it's posted anyway. You have to be very careful about using information from either site, unless the entry is accompanied by a link to a supporting document. This is particularly true if one is up-loading strings of information from either site. I've used Mocavo, but as you said, documents are behind a pay-wall.

And, when researching titled families of Europe, I find that Wikipedia has bios of a lot of them. And, as a last resort, using Google at least reveals other people working on the same lines. All in all, there is so much on-line that it keeps me entertained several hours each day.

[csziggy]

7. My Mom and my father's mother did all the footwork

Most of the time I spend on Ancestry and online is accumulating scans of the information they already had. When Mom and Grandmother were doing their research, they could only look at census indices - I can now get the scans of the original pages. I'm filling out the blank areas of family history and learning more details about my ancestors.

I have managed to take some lines a lot farther back just from online research. I'm lucky that many of my early families were Quakers, so the records are fabulous.

I got back into genealogy while I couldn't stand or walk much so online research was pretty much my only option. While a lot of the same info is available free from other sources, Ancestry has better search engines.

I seldom use other people's trees or the postings in Rootsweb. I go directly to original sources such as census, or verified secondary sources, such as transcriptions of town records, local histories, and some published family histories.

Our local library system is small and does not have any genealogical services so if I need anything from behind a pay wall, I have to pay. Considering the volumes of material I have downloaded from Ancestry, the library would be really fed up with me monopolizing their computers, anyway.

For outside of Ancestry, I use a lot of state archive material that is online and fee. South Carolina is wonderful - they have a lot of documents, wills and deeds, that help a lot. I verified one of Mom's ancestor's wife's maiden name, her father's, mother's and grandparents' names and proved that the wife of another ancestor was a sister through a series of wills, estate papers, and deeds.

Virginia has a lot, but their indexing is not as easy to use as SC. North Carolina is county by county, but I'm lucky that Chatham County is excellent since one branch went through there. Pennsylvania's archives online has tons, but their indexing is archaic - you have to use the original indices to find where to go for deeds, for instance. But I did manage to find the deeds for the land my ancestors bought directly from William Penn!

I've scrounged every bit of data I could get from the USGenWeb Archives for the places where my ancestors lived. I've looked at DNA family projects for clues even though I have not yet had my DNA sampled - I did find a clue that gave me another family branch back to their arrival in the Americas, even though that was not the DNA project I was looking at!

I've checked FamilySearch.com - the LDS site - and had limited success with them. FreeBMD.org.uk gave me some help on my United Kingdom branches.

So I am not just relying on Ancestry - It's just the easiest way to get the scans of the papers I want. Where it was great was for researching my BIL's family. His father's people came from Hungary (I'm not sure what country it is in at the moment). On Ancestry I found the passenger list for the ship where the immigrants came over and that named the villages they were from. Ancestry had just added records from those villages so I was able to give him much more detail than he had ever known!