The prospect of months of delays
Ugh.
The news about RootsWeb is thoroughly depressing.
When The Legal Genealogist wrote on Monday about using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine or the caching features of search engines like Google as a stop-gap measure,1 what I had in mind was a short-term stop gap.
Weeks, perhaps.
Optimistically, even days.
Yeah, right.
The news came yesterday without fanfare as an update on the RootsWeb homepage, and it’s thoroughly ugly and depressing.
We’re talking months just to get minimal access back to some critical parts of this data.
Here’s what Ancestry is saying as of now:
Right now, the best way for us to meet both goals (security and access) is to begin bringing portions of RootsWeb back online in a read-only state. This means you will have access to content, but you will not be able to load new content in these sections. While this may not be ideal, it is the best way for us to protect RootsWeb users while also providing the ability to use the content you value. This is an interim step while we continue to evaluate the potential for bringing more of the RootsWeb services back online in a more complete manner.
Hereās our current plan:
Hosted Web Sites: Soon we will begin bringing Hosted Web Sites back online. We will start with a few hundred and then add more over time, giving us a chance to scan the content.
Family Trees/WorldConnect: Family Trees or WorldConnect allows you to upload a GEDCOM file and publish it for others to see. It is currently being reviewed by our software engineers and security team and we plan on having a read-only, searchable version up in the next few weeks. The ability to upload new GEDCOM files will be available in the coming months.
Mailing Lists: Mailing Lists have been functioning as normal, but the archives have been unavailable. We plan to make the archives available to you once we have WorldConnect available to you in a readable version.
We will be making decisions about other functionality over time.2
This is Not Good News.
Not at all.
And it’s obviously going to take a lot more time than any of us had hoped. While I challenge Ancestry and its software engineers and security team to surprise us — pleasantly — I’m not going to be shocked or dismayed if the reality leaves us disappointed.
All of which absolutely underscores the critical importance, for all of us who use the internet to exchange family information, of having a complete backup of our data in more than one place. The simple reality is that none of us can safely rely on a single resource to store or share our information. We have to have backups and a plan to be able to access and restore our data if the worst happens to the site we’ve chosen to use.
And it also absolutely underscores the critical importance of keeping in mind, always, that āyou get what you pay for.ā Or, putting it another way using another cliche, āthere’s no such thing as a free lunch.ā Time after time, users who have relied on a free web resource have ended up being burned as their data either disappeared, became inaccessible or slipped behind a pay wall.
All of us need to think about how we can protect and preserve for the future all of the hard work we’ve put into our family history websites, particularly if we’ve chosen to put them on free websites that could well disappear without notice.
ā¢ Getting together with cousins we’re collaborating with, writing up our findings and self-publishing in book form is one option. Using services like Lulu.com, producing copies of that family history in soft- or hardcover doesn’t have to be expensive.
ā¢ Getting together with cousins that we’re collaborating with and buying web hosting for some term into the future on a basic web hosting service would mean we have (a) control over that website and (b) some assurance that it will exist for at least the term of that hosting. This doesn’t have to be expensive: many web hosts offer good plans for less than $50 a year. And, of course, once we have our own websites up and running, we can submit our sites to Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for archiving into the indefinite future.
ā¢ Even printing out the pages on our home printers and making sure that copies are in the vertical surname files of genealogy libraries in the areas where our ancestral lines lived is better than doing nothing and then bemoaning that we suddenly lost access to a website we weren’t paying for.
Think about it. Plan for it. Backup your research data now.
SOURCES
- See Judy G. Russell, āUsing the Internetās time machine,ā The Legal Genealogist, posted 8 Jan 2018 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 10 Jan 2018). ↩
- āRootsWeb is currently unavailable,ā RootsWeb.com (http://www.rootsweb.com/ : accessed 10 Jan 2018). ↩
Between the Rootsweb situation and the redesign of Find-a-Grave that’s making so many people unhappy, I despair of Ancestry’s ability to really manage these resources in any way that benefits the people who’ve contributed so much to them. All of your suggestions for backing up and saving information are timely and on point.
All we can do at this point is challenge Ancestry to make it right… and cover our own bases.
Iām glad to see Iām not the only one frustrated with the loss of Rootsweb AND the changes to Fibdagrave. Iāve contacted both but it was just a waste of time.
I won’t be shocked either, Judy, in the sense of being shocked by gambling at Ric’s Cafe in Casablanca. This smells considerably like a CYA approach. I’d be happier if they just put it all back online and said “read our new legal disclaimer that now says ‘use it at your own risk’ because we won’t accept any liability whatsoever . . .” I further see this as an opportunity for Ancestry to, as you put it, “slip it behind a pay wall” once their legal team finds an loophole in their original agreement to keep it available. Yeah, I’m a cynic but I live in D.C. so it, quite literally, comes with the territory. I will be really shocked if Rootsweb returns in its former glory – and I hope I will be proven wrong.
Because so much of RootsWeb requires log-in credentials, I understand the issues with bringing it back. I just wish the read-only part could be done faster (much faster) and like you hope to be proven wrong…
This has been done years ago by Ancestry. It was a free site at the time.
All posted their trees and all were free to use them. When they received all they needed a pa was put up and we lost all free access. Trust no one. Back up everything in many places.
Jack
I agree, seems like a scheme to take all of our hard work and now make us pay to access it and share with our fellow genealogists. It really stinks, but I’m surprised they let it go on this long.
I believe they think we will all forget about it. I am so heart-broken about this. There was some really amazing content on the site. Slave narratives, transcribed deeds and wills, stories, trees that had sources… so much great stuff. What can we do? We have to do something!
For the time being, try to find the info on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. For the long term, Ancestry is committed to bringing this content back at least in a read-only format.
I do believe ancestry is hoping we will all “fogettaboudit” – because when I tried to access my rootsweb freepages website recently they no longer show the “ancestry is working on it” message. I take that as a clue that my site and others like it are gone forever. But I stopped being heartbroken awhile back. I am now putting my info on wikitree.com which I like because it has sources and encourages sources. – I had backed up my freepages website so I still have that data, but have not decided whether to put it somewhere else in the same format. – I subscribed to the wayback machine but was not able to figure out how to find and view old pages.
Using the Wayback Machine is easy: enter the URL any page used to have (it’ll probably come up in a Google search).
I had no problem getting the wayback machine to work but only some things are on it. So far, only about 10-20% of the stuff I wanted was there. I wonder if Ancestry would give that data up to MyHeritage or to FamilySearch.org. There were so many sourced trees that were so wonderful and a lot of the people who created all that are long gone. Russell County Virginia had put 4 transcribed deed books, their will book and their court records from the early 1800’s there. You just cant replace that kind of stuff. It is pure genealogy gold and that is just one example. We have to get that stuff back.
I absolutely agree that material is precious, and perhaps now that the worst of GDPR is behind us all, some resources can be freed up.
One of the practices I have developed over the years is to grab information when I see it. This has evolved over time, from just accessing a record on a website and citing that source, to getting a screen shot along with the source and the date I accessed it. You really never know when someone or some company will decide to take down what you found or make it impossible to find again, at least in the same way.
A very good research practice!
Lisa has a good point. I have evolved over the years of doing research in the very same way. We all should be careful to retain copies of things we find on a site that could disappear at some point. I now pdf everything to my hard drive and organize in folders.
Backup backup backup.
Agreed. And why would you keep ALL your information online anyway when there are so many good programs available to keep it organized on your own PC with several backup external hard drives etc. Even with all the technology out there, it is not infallible.
Especially obituaries and death notices, which all seem to be deleted from the websites of the newspapers and funeral homes where they were originally published a year or two after the person’s death. Yes, you can often still find them on newspapers.com, but even if you can afford the subscription fee, there are are sometimes subtle differences in appearance.
Good reminder. I haven’t backed up my tree in a bit. Off to do so now.
I’m completely self-taught, but I learned early on in computer-based research to get a copy of anything I came across before leaving the site! It literally might not be there the next morning!
And we’ve seen things disappear only too often, darn it! Good for you for doing that! š
I guess the good news is that they are working on it and being straight up about the problems involved. It’s so easy to take things for granted, and assume something will always be there.
I am working just now on piecing together a picture of my TN and KY ancestors as they moved from one place to another, appeared and disappeared. I do mean piece: each tiny bit of info gives a brief glimpse. Largely burnt counties or places that just didn’t keep records, so rely on all sorts of things for clues. Gradually it is coming together, but can’t help but think that when people wrote those things down, they thought it would be permanent, or sometimes that the info was temporary so didn’t matter. Yet the simple act of placing a list of letters available at a post office let me place my ancestor in a specific place at a specific time, and differentiate him from his uncle and his cousin of the same name.
We forget how hard a task it is we have undertaken. I am not a huge fan of Ancestry, but in this case they’ve undertaken something very challenging. Yeah, I’d like to get at stuff RIGHT NOW while I’m on the scent. But think: the internet gave me that little piece of info last night (yeah, one of those rabbit hole nights…). I can be patient, and hopeful that Ancestry can put together something to at least let folks access what there is in RootsWeb while they work on the rest.
As for backing up, absolutely. I learned that lesson way back when. If it is worth working on, it is worth making copies and keeping them up to date. Online in two places, portable hard drive, and hard copy. I like the idea of creating a workbook type publication for my children, two of whom are interested in continuing this (I am blessed!). Workbook because the more I do, the more questions there are, and if I can leave the questions and the to-dos and the hints for them, they can be off and running, knowing where the uncertainties are, and which things have solid citations and proofs. It’s really up to us. Whether RootsWeb continues or not (and I hope it does), there will be someplace for our work.
Having backups of our own work and our research is absolutely up to us.
I’ve just read all the comments about backing up and plan to pursue some of them. Could you please elaborate a bit on what you mean by a “workbook type” product? I’m assuming that it’s a looseleaf binder, but thought I’d check with you. thanks
I don’t know what Annie is planning, but in graduate school, one of my instructors taught us to keep a research journal in in sewn composition books that are made for school kids. My instructor uses them because they are sturdy and relatively inexpensive. We numbered all the pages so it would be obvious if a page got torn out, and we dated all the entries. If we wanted to include other materials like photocopies of photos, maps, or other documents (not originals!) we tipped them in. This isn’t as flexible as a loose-leaf binder, but it gives you a chronological record of your research. We indexed everything with paper slip files, but these days, I might also use bullet journal techniques to have an index for surnames, localities, and major keywords in the journal itself.
IF rootsweb comes back I expect it will be read only. No more new messages accepted. And I expect it will be long enough that we forget about it. IF ancestry would devote their resources to genealogy instead of new ways to display it, I’d be a lot happier. Expect findagrave to be behind a pay wall within 5 years.
RootsWeb mail lists (messaging) should still be working. The archives and other resources are affected.
Thank God I print things I want to save. Years ago things would disappear from the internet so I took to printing. A paperless world is a crock – it forces me to print things sent paperlessly (eg bank statements). Ancestry has the right to do what it wants with what it owns. If one doesn’t like it and can’t afford to change it – tough. Reality isn’t always what we want. Another example of the failure of collectivism – self reliance is the way to go.
As a former CIO of a financial institution, I can tell you that this is NOT that hard to fix. Think about banks, airlines, and other institutions who have had breaches – do they shut their systems down? No they don’t and they have a far larger quantity of personal information that is far higher risk. This is moving slowly because Ancestry is not making it a priority. There is so much content on Rootsweb that has NO security issue and does not require credentials. This should have already been back online by now. I am shocked that Ancestry did not have to sign some sort of service-level agreement, guaranteeing some reasonable level of system availability. My tree is on Ancestry.com and I back it up periodically onto Family Tree Maker. The issue is all of those rich sources and research that were on rootsweb. I feel that I am flying blind without it. There were so many great websites with rich information that I relied on. Very sad they are handling this in this manner. I think they do not realize the bad feelings they are creating among their user community.
Nothing is hard to fix if you devote the resources to it…
What this Ancestry Rootsweb takedown has done for me is to get me energized on finally updating everything in my offline gedcom/ family tree file so that I can be ready to place my data somewhere safe and permanent. And to calm myself down from the initial outrage I felt when I first discovered the takedown. This is a wake up call and should be treated as such.
Before 12/23/17 it had been on my To Do List for 2018 to get back to my family tree file and additional research, and mostly to review everything to make sure I was not posting any unsafe or confusing data on WorldConnect. And I especially wanted to be more mindful what research was being placed in my NOTES section that could be prepared in a cleaner way for my next upload/update to WC. Now it looks like it will be months before I would be able to upload anything new at WC anyway and it may be changed in format by the time WC is back up anyway.
But I have also been reviewing other options on where to place my data once Iāve completed my updates. I am leaning towards the familysearch.org (LDS) family trees. It is still a free site although they now require you to have a log in account to access their records for research. And they have excellent customer support and responded to questions I had very quickly (within 24 hours). I discovered also from searches I was doing online that they do have a joint agreement in place (since 2013) with ancestry.com to share all data. Something I didnāt know before is that LDS church members now get free access to 99% of ancestry.com data – Yes -Free. Iām not sure I care about that, but if you are an LDS member you should definitely sign up for that. LDS will take your data seriously. This is important to them for reasons aside from money. Itās a complicated process, but once your data is there and made searchable, itās there.
Then because LDS on familysearch will only post data it can verify, you go on to deciding where to place more of the data you might want available online somewhere else. This might include the stories that were in your notes sections on WC or your photos or whatever you had that isnāt the main birthādeath dates, etc., the things that might not post on either ancestry or familysearch. Maybe you do want to do a self-published book, or maybe do a free genealogy blog on WordPress or other major blog site.
Judy talks about āgetting what you pay forā and if itās free her implication is that maybe youāre not getting something reliably āthere.ā I think we are all concerned about future generations to have access to our work once we are dead and gone. And that is precisely why I disagree that if you pay for a site it is reliable. Because I can be paying for something while I am alive, but if I am gone and the monthly bills for a āpayā site are not getting paid, it will soon be deleted from access to others anyway. So for me, Free is the way to go in terms of placing my family tree info or family tree website somewhere for others to find down the line. But go ahead and pay for research access if you want and can afford it, Iām ok with that, and have paid in the past despite how ācheapā I may sound. But now that Iām retired thatās a luxury for me and many others.
I am the only one in my close family with an interest in this genealogy stuff, and so I pretty much know my computer and files will be ditched as soon as Iām gone. Other genealogy buffs I corresponded with over the years – and that did tremendous amounts of research – have now passed on. It really saddens me that so much of their hard work might now be lost.
Iāve gone on too long but welcome comments or suggestions.
One last thing I discovered in the past couple weeks – I found a valuable article and all should read it:
Stop āSavingā Records to Your Ancestry Tree Until You Read This (Family History Daily), at: https://familyhistorydaily.com/genealogy-help-and-how-to/stop-saving-records-to-your-ancestry-tree-until-you-read-this/
(This article notes that if you save records on ancestry.com to a tree there while you have a subscription, they will be lost once your paid subscription is over so download anything you get there during your research process.)
Thanks Judy for your blog. I only recently subscribed but you do have a lot of useful info on it.
None of us is happy about this as a wake-up call… but the wake-up call itself is something many of us need.
Well said totally agree, I donot pay these big bro companies a cent never have and never will, takes the fun out of finding it yourself and giving you a challenge to get it with your won means. Back in the days when you could find xxxx it gave you that challenge but to go back there now one finds that the big corps have taken it and shut it down. I have placed heaps on the wayback site for others to find and dont get me started on the DNA rubbish.
The only “rubbish” in DNA is in the uncritical acceptance of the ethnicity estimates (which are called estimates for a reason). The matching and other information, at least with closer relatives, is spot on and exceedingly useful for breaking down brick walls.
Thanks Brad. Like you, I enjoyed the challenge in the old days too – when we all collaborated using free sites like Rootsweb and WorldConnect and helped each other freely. It makes me sort of sentimental, and I feel lucky to have been a part of that. But I can see now how things are changing…. in my mind because of the push of investors in Ancestry to eventually get their money back. For instance, see Permira’s boasting about their Ancestry investment and what they accomplished: https://www.permira.com/portfolio/ancestrycom/ – the DNA business and the “optimized segmentation” (that we all hate) really paid off according to that page.
But I agree with Judy too – the DNA stuff is not all BS. I had it done through Ancestry, although there are many others out there that do it too. And that did help me connect with someone who was able to help me fill in some big gaps on my family tree. So it can be useful. AS for their little world maps, it basically confirmed what I already had researched. On that front, there was not much new data. – And don’t forget for many people the DNA testing is the best clues they’ll get. Because their ancestors were slaves, or they have been adopted and know nothing about their birth family, etc. You don’t have to do it through Ancestry though, but with their access to other records, that’s how I got matched up.
I can confirm that the financial cost of using places like Lulu.com can be quite reasonable. If you want the content to read well, be well documented, etc… the time investment will be the much more expensive part. But once I had a 246 page (8.5″ x 11″) text, I could publish cheaply enough that when one of the cousin researchers who got a free copy asked for more copies, I could set the site price at $12 and recoup some of my expense for the free copies I had sent to fellow researchers, NEHGS, and relevant local/state genealogical/historical societies.
Our genealogical society has used RootsWeb to house many or our indexes and resources. Unfortunately they don’t seem to be available using the WayBack Machine – which if/when the RootsWeb pages become viewable again, we will certainly have to register them with WayBack. Fortunately we do have offsite copies, so will now have to find another way to make them available.
That is depressing.
From the user standpoint, my concern is primarily that our society webpage is hosted on RootsWeb. We’ve been looking for a new host, anyway, but this certainly will accelerate that process!
As a former IT professional, I have to agree with Terry’s earlier comment. What this really demonstrates is (a) the utter incompetence of the Ancestry IT staff, and/or (b) the utter contempt Ancestry has for the free sites under its control.
As just me speaking, this is just further support for my contention that Ancestry has become just another company that puts the shareholders above all, the customers be damned.
It’s an unfortunate wake-up call, for sure… but a wake-up call nonetheless.
As a professional, I’m ready to quit Ancestry and familysearch.org( who also gave us a nasty shock with their no more microfilms) and go back to the archives myself. This is the most awful thing I have seen in this industry. To take down all of the things given to our communities by members ( and given to the ancestry.com community by our communities) I am dismayed, appalled and disappointed by all of our paid and free websites. This is setting all of us back to 1930’s research. Horrible to have to tell clients that research has suddenly lapsed by 50 years.
While I’m disappointed at the delay in restoring the RootsWeb content, I am encouraged that Ancestry is committed to getting it back online at least as read-only (which allows us to continue to use these sites for research). As for FamilySearch, seriously, there is no difference to researchers between access to records on microfilm and access to records on the computer. In the short term, it means that records we used to see on microfilm at a Family History Center we now will see on a computer at a Family History Center. In the long run, it’s going to mean that vastly more records will be available from our home computers online.
My cynicism aside, Judy, in the short to medium term I think you are incorrect. Perhaps I have misunderstood the process but, if not, there is a difference in the records we can now examine at a local FHC. The FHC has stopped ALL microfilm delivery but they have not yet digitalized ALL microfilmed records. That means MUCH of their collection will be available at a local FHC but nowhere near the full body that was previously “orderable.” Eventually everything will be digitalized and available but, until that happens, one can only hope that what you want to see is in the “already digitalized” category. BTW, to me the decision to take this road was likely due to the serious decline in traffic through the local FHCs – they need some justification to keep them open and needed to counter the trend. The onslaught of information available through Ancestry and other for-profit companies has eroded their client base and that is at least at some level due to the LDS’s data sharing agreements with Ancestry. I think the NEHGS likely faces a similar situation. I applaud both for trying to get more benefits for their customer base but to some extent they have made deals with the devil.
I suspect you’re right in the short term: some things will be accessible only at the Family History Library. The push to digitize however is going full steam ahead and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if FamilySearch exceeds its target time goal to get all of its circulating microfilm digitized.
I work at one of the local Family History Centers. The reason that one can no longer order in films for viewing is the fact that they can no longer purchase the blank filmstrip materials (it is no longer being manufactured………we no longer use film in our cameras, we all have digital cameras………we like that too). Original films were never sent out to the FHCs. The films we received were duplicates. They no longer have the materials to create duplicates.
Even what is available is hard to get and very expensive — going digital really is the answer for the long term.
correction: “i work at a FHC…The reason that one can no longer order in films for viewing is the fact that they can no longer purchase the blank filmstrip materials (it is no longer being manufacturedā¦” No. i also work at a FHC. the film is still available. But, the price per roll shot up dramatically due to limited demand and increased cost from the supplier. The FHC couldn’t ask people to pay $25-50 a roll…
Wonder how websites that US Gen county coordinators still have on Rootsweb are impacted. We still either have to able to have a somewhat functioning site or able to move it.
Anything that’s on RootsWeb is impacted, more or less. Mail lists the least, but everything to one degree or another.
I remember when Rootsweb was ‘adopted’ by Ancestry. Some of the coordinators from USGenWeb and other organizations were furious and moved off Rootsweb, and got hooted at for their outrage. Now perhaps the people who didn’t get it when Genealogy.com and GenForum were gutted will understand their concern.
What is going on with Ancestry? Last night I couldn’t access my tree all evening. Kept giving me “Error 500”. Now today I have the same problem. Calling their support center and I’ve been on hold forever. It’s been buggy and slow for the past several weeks. Anyone else having a problem?
Nope and nope. Can’t reproduce it, not having any issues, no problem accessing trees.
Sorry, finally got through to the support center. They had me clear my browsing history, cache, and cookies and the problem went away. First time that has ever happened. Weird.
Glad you got it taken care of!
I was at RootsTech this week. I raised the issue of RootsWeb with every Ancestry person I could find. Most seemed unaware of what I was event talking about – sigh. š I got the distinct impression at the conference that their focus, as a company, is to put their investment more toward cutesy-but-not-so-enlightening tools to accompany their DNA tests. One tool highlighted was a very complex mathematical algorithm that revealed that people who landed in SC migrated toward Alabama. Anyone who has done any genealogy on ancestors in Alabama could have told them this. I am at a loss to understand how we get this message to them. Would it be possible to get FamilySearch or one of Ancestors competitors to take this content from them? I MISS IT SO MUCH! We created this content and it is just GONE…
Here’s an article about the Wayback Machine Save Page Now feature from the Internet Archive’s blog: “If You See Something, Save Something ā 6 Ways to Save Pages In the Wayback Machine” https://blog.archive.org/2017/01/25/see-something-save-something
Obviously we can’t use Save Page Now to save RootsWeb material at the moment, but if you have saved a RootsWeb URL in your research notes, there are some scripts and add-ons you can use to look for saved copies.
I’ve found errors in my WorldConnect pages I want to correct, and I’ve been steadily gathering new data I’d like to share on WC. Being prevented from doing so is extremely frustrating.
You’re probably going to want to consider one reality: you get what you pay for. This is why I’ve paid for my own website for years — to ensure that I have access when I want and need it.
To add insult to injury, ancestry.com has removed many trees that didn’t make the test to be searchable. My 11 trees were removed because they were not sourced. All my trees were totally sourced in the gedcom format. Then they say they were removed because they were not attached to online ancestry image links/sources, ie Census record images. So if your ancestry.com tree is missing, then your gedcom file tree could have been deleted from the search engins, but still visable in you trees list but only to you. My trees were uploaded multiple times per year and was always in the search to help others as ancestry says they recommend to help others. So rootsweb has been crashed, findagrave is being reworked, and most of my searching requests are taking forever to appear meaning a major slowdown.
Ancestry appears broken so backup your trees to a gedcom file and hope someone other then ancestry will provide a rootsweb style interface for free gedcom files of family trees.
So, as of July 2nd, does anyone have inside information as to whether Worldconnect will ever allow updating, uploading, or removing of our gedcoms? I get the same automatic replies when I ask a question–has been going on for months. I do not mind paying to put my gedcom somewhere else (and of course have it on my computer and backed up also), but what is a good place used by hundreds of thousands of people? It needs to allow users to generate a Register Report, and I would prefer it to have none of those stupid pink and blue heads either. I want a serious site with good reports, the sort used by professional genealogists when writing scholarly articles.
Now that it’s back up…it’s awful. š I miss the old so much!!
I agree Cherilyn. It’s a paltry and self-serving attempt by Ancestry to pacify the old rootsweb WorldConnect community.
A few months ago my WC gedcom was still there, even if my name (as the contributor) had been changed from Bonnie Follett to just plain Bonnie. You could at least see the gedcom title, the number of individuals in my gedcom, the last update date, and review it in the old user-friendly format. Now when I access the link to my WC gedcom page I get transferred to this url: https://wc.rootsweb.com/trees/110008/I1/-/individual – It defaults to individual 1 (usually the living individual who created the gedcom).
The main WC page now seems to be this: https://wc.rootsweb.com/ – which only gives you a garbage dump of old gedcom names (drawn from your old url identifier) that all link to individual one, gives no attribution to the contributors, no last update date, no cohesion of information, etc. You have to play with menus to try to find anything related to your old gedcom individuals. I think it has been redesigned to NOT be user friendly and to simply take all contributed information and call it “rootsweb owned by Ancestry.”
On the plus side – I was able to create a new account and password on the new system. It was then able to link my two gedcoms I had on the system to my new account. I appear to now have the option to delete those gedcoms or add a new one.
I haven’t yet decided what to do about deleting my old gedcoms. I am thinking of adding a small “test” gedcom to see what happens with it. I suspect it will get dumped into the new system which as we can see lacks any user-friendly component, with no ability to search individual gedcoms. I suspect it also is being coded so that no one in these WC files gets indexed by search engines.
Also on the plus side, if you explore the menus and links, you can do a name search for individuals. That’s at: https://wc.rootsweb.com/search – This will get a list of that individual name that was included in various gedcoms (again with no attribution or cohesiveness as to a particular gedcom) but it is still possible to research (in a clunky way) what others once had on WorldConnect. You just have to check each individual in the search result – but there is no “go back” possible to your search result page. Trying to go back causes you to have to redo your search after each individual you have viewed. Again it seems designed to NOT be user friendly.
I am curious about other people’s thoughts on the rootsweb WorldConnect changes by Ancestry. And Judy, if you have thoughts or additional perspective on the changes, there are probably many people from the old RW/WC community who would be interested in hearing them.
My thoughts are simple: particularly these days we get what we pay for — and only what we pay for.
What happen to Rootsweb.com is sinful. So If Ancestry. com won’t fix want they broke, at lest go back to the old system and charge a small fee for using Rootsweb.com. This makes me sick that such a beautiful and helpful website has been destroyed because of greed.
Is Roots web still accessible? I am trying to delete some information that is still showing up from the old site and am unable to do so. Under the old system, I deleted all my trees but information is still showing up. What can I do to erase these entries.
I’m not sure how you could access that if your log-in doesn’t work. Contacting Ancestry would be the way to go.
Sadly, there are no notes anymore (???). Is there any chance these will be brought back in the future?
Many notes were copied gibberish, but others gave a lot of useful background.
No realistic chance at all. What you see is what you get on RootsWeb, I’m afraid.
Happily, the notes (at least a lot of them) have returned. They are positioned at the bottom, as one giant note, with no formatting. But at least the important data is there.
I just noticed them, so maybe they have been there for 6 days or 6 months.
I just found this after trying to lookup the difference between Ancestry and Rootsweb -I new at researching family. I can only conclude that I need to get a large SSD for local backup and seriously consider paying for decentralised backup with Sia or one of the otehr decentralised storage options being developed.
Haven’t been doing any genealogical research in at least 15 years or so but found some new info accidentally so went back to look at all the sites I used to use like Rootsweb. PROFOUNDLY SHOCKED at how all these sites were destroyed or “modified” to make them almost useless. Interesting how only Ancestry seems to be functioning now behind an EXPENSIVE pay wall. Very disgusted by this now monopoly. Just venting, alas. Does anyone have any free or cheaper sites they’d recommend? I refuse to use Ancestry.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Even sites that are free for researchers have to be paid for by somebody. The big site that is free for researchers is FamilySearch.org — paid for by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Hi Joan – Judy is correct that familysearch.org (“FS”) is the best “free” place to search your family. If you have been “away” from genealogy for awhile, you will see that some things have changed. You only need to sign up and create a login at familysearch to have free access there. – I too went through the same “shock” period that it sounds like you only more recently discovered about rootsweb. It’s now pretty much part of a bygone era. I have accepted that the tree I had there is no longer useable. I’m pretty sure now that the framework for those sites was lacking security under current standards for coding and web development. Many people were upset with how Ancestry chose to deal with that. But we have to move on.
I chose to move my publicly accessible family tree to wikitree.com. Both familysearch and wikitree now use the concept of a “One World Tree” for profiles – this means one profile page for each individual (as opposed to the former concept of each person uploading their personal version of their family tree which resulted in numerous people being duplicated in various ways which were sometimes inaccurate or lacking sources). I have found that I LOVE this concept of one profile. It has furthered family research by tremendous jumps and bounds. It forces better sourcing out of people, and better sharing. When you see a badly sourced profile, you can just update it. When duplicates are found, you merge them to one profile. When you have an additional spouse, sibling or child, you add them in, along with your sources. – Wikitree claims to have taken steps and done everything they can to make sure the data there will be preserved, but even they caution that someday (far into the future) it could become a “static” tree site (no changes allowed) based on unforeseen circumstances. I love wikitree though. It is a fun place.
So my process has become this: I have an offline family tree program where I gather my research finds and update my data, then I update the wikitree and familysearch profiles from there. I also have an older tree on Ancestry that I uploaded many moons ago, and I update my info there when time permits. What is interesting though, is that recently some friends I did research for thanked me by getting me a 6 month all access pass to Ancestry, so I’ve had the opportunity to compare platforms. I found that most of the info that Ancestry “Hints” points me to are things I already found at FamilySearch or elsewhere. Their independent “Search” function is far more clunky than the one FS uses. I also found many gaps in what info they currently had for certain foreign countries (although they are fairly good in others). I also prefer FS source citations to those recommended at Ancestry which are cumbersome and lacking the data I like to include in my cites, which forces me to rewrite them before I share them. But Ancestry has also been useful to fill in gaps with a few records that FS does not yet have. So I view it as the last place to look in researching. Maybe not worth investing in unless you’ve already first done your preliminary research on FS, and the internet in general.
This is way too long. I just wanted to share some ideas on how I responded to losing my tree info at rootsweb and WorldConnect. I needed to verify and organize my data and research anyway, which had long been on my agenda.
thank you for sharing. apparently nothing new is happening on the BETA site. Very sad. Such a tragic loss of information. I cannot seem to find any where they might have posted about any updates. The Search page is still useless as it was when they brought it back online so long ago.
Martin – Thanks for your post. I suspect the “notes” you refer to may be the incredibly valuable research that people used to store with their tree info. They would often include abstracts of deeds and wills or other conclusions researchers had reached and the reasons for those conclusions. I have not been able to find any “notes” in the new system. Would you be willing to share how one can access these old research notes? In the old days, you could search by ancestor name and other criteria, it would bring up a list of trees that matched and you could click on each and see what various people had recorded, including their notes. The old screen had icons to tell you which trees had sources and notes and which didn’t. Is there a way to do this with whatever is left… if you can understand what i am trying to describe here? Thanks!
I began my research in 1960 and still have all my info on my home computer. I was on Rootsweb until I retired 1994. I was the listowner of CADDELL-L til then. I an now 86 and am beginning again. My research went back to Scotland in about 1340s. I did a one-name study of my surname & variations. My wife and I went to Scotland twice in the 1990s and learned a lot. When I had internet installed again this year – to my surprise to not find anything about Rootsweb until now.