Rootsweb Gets A New Address
I suppose it was inevitable that when The Generations Network bought Rootsweb there would be some changes. It was announced today that there will be an address change for Rootsweb, but not a change in availability or affordability. It will still be free, which is very good news. If you are new to Rootsweb, its intent was that it would be by the people, and for the people, and it touted itself as the only free place on the web to find genealogical information.
As you can see from the comments on the link I included here, most seem to feel that this is the beginning of the end of Rootsweb as a free entity. We can only wait and see, I guess, but sad to say, it may be that once again greed will win out.
What will be different is that the Web address for all RootsWeb pages will change from www.rootsweb.com to www.rootsweb.ancestry.com.
- Don’t forget the other enormously helpful (and still free) site USGenWeb is still available for your family history research needs too.
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Oh no! I can’t stand the ancestry stuff, it’s rubbish. Click and search here and we’ll tell you to pay us lots of money for something that is probably no good to you at all. Hmpf. Well if it looks or works like the rest I won’t be going back there again.
Alison’s last blog post..The Buccaneers & Aristocrats
Certain areas of Ancestry are just fine if you want to pay to get records like censuses, etc.. I have found that invaluable since I can’t always get to a genealogy library and would probably go blind just looking at reel after reel of images.
What I don’t like about Ancestry is their World Family Tree because it is just family trees uploaded to Ancestry and many of them contain errors and completely wrong information.
I feel the same way about the LDS site and their International Genealogical Index. Those are submitted records too, and not always reliable either.
I guess the “big” services cannot provide information for all names. Especially people with very rare names have to do the research by themselves and build a network with others doing the same research. At least, that is what we are doing.
I agree Landschoof. I have a family surname that is Osgathorpe. The man it is traced back to fought in the American Rev. War and I have copies of his pay vouchers. I intend to add him to my Patriots in my DAR list, but it is a bear of a name to research. Mostly because it is also a locality name in England, where the man originated. When the family migrated through the generations from North Carolina to Kentucky and then to Tennessee, the name evolved to “Osgatharp”.