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A year ago last week, I tried to sign up for a freepapges account. I said I wanted to provide:

"A resource for tracking legislation of interest to genealogists as well as supportive and unsupportive public and media representatives."

They turned me down because my proposal was not related to genealogy.

I made some comments about the reply to someone well-connected at the company. That prompted the following reply from Betsey Mills, the staffer who apparently handles freepages accounts:

"We are not making non-genealogy accounts anymore -- and THAT is the reason the request was denied. If you want to request an account for your personal genealogy and put a page in there for this, that is fine with
me."

My conclusion at that time: As far is Rootsweb is concerned, "legislation of interests to genealogists" = "non-genealogy."


If most of your stuff was genealogy, I suggest you write to betsey@rootsweb.com, ask her why she killed the genealogy data, and let us know the reply, if any.

From Steve:
".....Remember way back when, when MyFamily purchased RootsWeb, and everyone was happy that RootsWeb was going to be "saved"?

No. But I DO remember the event, remember the warnings from many posters and remember the accusations that we were nay-sayers, out to harm this wonderful addition to Genealogy evolution.
Many of us warned that Ancestry (and others) decision-makers had no real clues about Genealogy, and that it was just a business for them. They were jumping at the chance to make a fast buck from a very lucrative, rapidly growing hobby.
They announce "projects" and end up presenting them half done, ignore their customers; dragging their feet but still shilling their product to the masses.
Why is anyone suprised that they are removing items that do not put revenue back into their pockets?

Steve,
Lesseee now, how long have I been saying the door has been slowly slamming shut????

And how long has Diane been publicly embarrassing them for not updating the SSDI????

And how long has everybody else been saying like things???

Buyer Beware.

Jeff asked:

>And how long has Diane been publicly
>embarrassing them for not updating the SSDI????

Funny you should ask that today (December 19). I've been meaning to go on the rampage again, and was ready to write a message today, but then I noticed they had updated the Rootsweb side to November just this morning.

The Ancestry side (where they offer one additional data element), did not get updated and still has September data.

To be fair, I must note that Ancestry has today essentially finished posting digital images of the 1930 census. Even though there are some problems with the results, they have done something in less than 9 months that the National Archives dismissed out-of-hand as being infeasible from both technological and financial standpoints. Ancestry (and HeritageQuest, too) seem to have been able to scan and index the images in less time than it took NARA to copy, catalog, and distribute microfilm copies.

On the other hand

I've been to hundreds of pages these past few weeks and many in the past couple of days with the addition of TX and TN. Have gone straight to every page I wanted. No problems whatsoever.

It is my understanding that Ancestry now has 40 states up. Their way of counting is to include a county and then they say that they have the state up

To Jeff:
On the computer at Ancestry. Last night I did get a page that stated the census page I wanted to see was not available with a list of possible reasons. It was available this morning.

Did you or your cousin report that problem you stumbled onto to Ancestry.com so that it could be fixed for others who might need that page? Did you hang a User Comment on the index telling others where to really find that page?

To Online Genealogy Ranters in general:
Some of you are very, very lucky to be free to pursue this hobby during library and court house hours, to live within justifiable distance of National, State and County resources, and to have remained in or returned to your ancestral homes where the local resources are of use to you in your family research. Thousands of others pursuing their family history do not have even one of those enviable luxuries. The online research options which you love to hate and harm are the most viable option to thousands of us who have done it your way with mail and long distance for years and still do to a lesser extent.

Even if I lived near resources that were useful to me, I would still use the online resources that I constantly evaluate for their worth to my hobby. My free time is between 9:00 PM and 6:00 AM. I like sitting in front of my computer with all my books and files within reach. I like the ability to sift through the secondary sources, indexes and transcriptions online to hone down the right State, County and City entities to send for the primary sources with my envelopes and stamps on the table beside me.

I used to rent microfilm, wait impatiently for its arrival in the mail, make an appointment to use the microfilm reader at the library, steal the time to go down there, wish I had drug in more files from home, and come up empty from guessing at or receiving the wrong ED#. We had to rent the Soundex films first and then return them and reorder the actual census film. The time between each morsel was at least two months.

At least one page of the census I view online is different than the one that I rented 10-15 years ago - its readable with the digital enhancement. The film I rented back then was completely black on the page I needed and until I saw it online, I had that thought that I would never see that family listed in that time period.

I have correspondents who dont even own a computer. I would never consider keeping my records by hand and only corresponding by mail or phone again, but I accept their choice and we share the results of our different approaches to this hobby with mutual respect.

All of RootsWeb is FREE and (aside from the FREE SSDI and vital records indexes) is user and volunteer contributed data, hints, tips and clues. The use of the RootsWeb name or recognizable variations in an assault on Ancestry (RootsWeb owner and the USGenWeb host and search engine provider) harms the work of thousands and thousands of contributors, volunteers and fellow family researchers in the past, present and future.

You are so right dg. I, too, resent the typical attitude of Jeff who looks down his nose at so many of us. I am physically disabled and cannot go to the library, etc., and do use Ancestry. I recognize that Ancestry does have problems with accuracy and completeness, but I can and do use its databases as a guideline.

Jeff, during the holidays could you possibly try to assume a disguise of good-neighborliness,good-humor and good-will towards all the rest of us stupid people out here in the genealogical trenches (and even towards your nemesis, Ancestry.com)? Please.

If all of us took your advice today and dropped our subscriptions and purchases to the online genealogy companies, how long would RootsWeb, USGenWEB, GenForum and a multitude of affiliates be free? Even a month?

Priceless volunteers gave years of their time to provide us that free data, but who ultimately provides the money to host and sustain any web site for free? Subscribers and customers.

Tell us were you can do all your research for free online without soiling yourself with an association to a for profit company and therefore subscribers and customers?

Do you boycott RootsWeb, USGenWeb, GenForum or any Ancestry or Genealogy.com affiliates? Even then you would rarely know whether one of us subscribers had donated the data or owned the web site you were using for free so you are definitely not pure there.

What happened to RootsWeb from lack of financial support from its users. It proved that voluntary support would not work for a huge and growing online database. What percent of free RootsWeb and USGenWeb users today are Ancestry subscribers? I believe that there is still a minority of subscribers, customers and volunteers who support a multitude of free users. Where would you who brag about never making any contribution be without us?

You should think about the time when more companies arise and the idiots who pay for subscriptions to support them could be spread too thin to support huge databases like RootsWeb and USGenWeb. They could get split into hundreds or thousands of sites and search engines rather than the central location and search engines they have now.

Look at the whole picture. Weight the bitter with the sweet. Don't bite the hands that feed you. Look to the future.