The Mad Genealogist

I have been using the Rootsweb County pages almost since its inception. Mainly with mixed results. Some County Coordinators (henceforth abbreviated as CC) do a fabulous job putting relevant information on the web, while others take the CC position and do nothing then disappear. The rest do an average job keeping the pages updated.There is a core group of CC’s that have been there for years and are really dedicated to the rootsweb philosophy of keeping Rootsweb free to all. Some have many websites in order to keep some counties from being abandoned. I have hosted a site or two over the years and it takes a certain amount of dedicated time in order to keep things fresh and active. I salute these people who have now or in the past been a CC of the rootsweb sites.

While the CC’s maintain the pages its really the users that donate material and money to the rootsweb project that really makes people come back to rootsweb time and time again. Apparently the donations that kept rootsweb free to the public dried up and things changed in a hurry.

RootsWeb.com had been growing in popularity for many years since it began in 1993. It started as a RootsWeb Surname List. Then a search engine, obituary lists, message boards, an ancestry search-engine list, volunteer genealogy projects, calendars, and other things were added over the years.

While the popularity grew, so did the expenses and cost. In 1996, RootsWeb began accepting donations from researchers to help support the Web site but the donations did not grow as fast as the expenses, and the non-profit operation was facing a bleak financial picture. The Generations Network (formerly MyFamily.com), which owns Ancestry.com, acquired RootsWeb in June 2000. Many people thought this to be a win-win situation and others thought it to be the first step to adding all the free information on rootsweb to Ancestry’s pay sites. The marriage seems to have been working out great and hushing the naysayers.

But earlier this year though, the decision was made to move Rootsweb to the Ancestry.com servers with the stated goal of making it easier for users of the two genealogy sites to access both resources. Here is the announcement to the CC’s:

RootsWeb Announcement Thursday, March 13, 2008

As you know, The Generations Network has hosted and funded the RootsWeb online community since June 2000, thereby maintaining RootsWeb as the world’s oldest and largest free genealogy website. TGN remains committed to this mission and believes that RootsWeb is an absolutely invaluable and complementary resource to Ancestry.com, our flagship commercial family history site. We believe in both services and want to see both communities prosper and grow.

As part of this goal, we have decided to “transplant” RootsWeb onto the Ancestry.com domain beginning next week. This move will not change the RootsWeb experience or alter the ease of navigation to or within RootsWeb. RootsWeb will remain a free online experience. What will be different is that the Web address for all RootsWeb pages will change from www.rootsweb.com to www.rootsweb.ancestry.com. Again, the RootsWeb experience is not changing.

The decision to host RootsWeb on Ancestry.com is being made for one primary reason: we believe that the users of each of our two main websites can be better served if they have access to the best services available on both. Simply stated, we want to introduce more Ancestry.com users to RootsWeb and vice versa.

Today, despite the fact that Ancestry.com and RootsWeb.com are the two most frequently visited family history sites on the Web, only 25 percent of visitors to Ancestry.com visited RootsWeb in January 2008, while only 20 percent of visitors to RootsWeb visited Ancestry.com (according to Comscore Media Metrix). We think we will serve our users best by doing a better job of letting them know what is available on both Ancestry.com and RootsWeb. Hosting RootsWeb on Ancestry.com is the first step towards making this happen, but we will absolutely look for more and better ways down the road to advance this goal.

Hosting RootsWeb on Ancestry.com will also make it easier for us to make changes and improvements to the RootsWeb experience in the future.

All old RootsWeb URLs will continue to work, whether they are bookmarks or favorites, links to or from a hosted page or URLs manually typed in your Internet browser. We will have a redirect in place so that all old URLs will automatically end up on the appropriate new RootsWeb URL. You will never need to update your old favorites or links unless you want to. We have worked to make the transition as seamless as possible for our users, and this change should have a minimal impact on your experience with the site.

RootsWeb will remain a free online experience dedicated to providing you with a place where our community can find their roots together. If you have questions regarding this change please email them to feedback@rootsweb.com.

Thanks,
Tim Sullivan, CEO, The Generations Network, Inc.

This has brought the naysayers back out of the woodwork. Basically at the top of every rootsweb hosted page is basically and ad for ancestry.com. The question is if this is ok to do. After all TGN actually pays for the servers that host the free rootsweb sites so don’t have a right to place a little something up there for there trouble. On the surface I would say yes. But many CC’s do not see it that way and a great many of them have moved there sites off of the Ancestry servers to their own personal or donated servers so the county site will not show an ad by ancestry.com. about 90% of the maillist I am a member of have already sent their new urls to the list audience. Are most of the others doing the same? I bet they are.

So what happens when TGN realizes that half (which is just a guess, could be more and could be less) of the County pages have moved. Will they care? or will there be retribution against the “rebel” CC’s. I don’t know but I guess we will all find out soon enough.