RootsWeb Newsroom

The past year has seen a number of changes to the RootsWeb Review. First, long-time editor Myra Gormley retired. Then, after ten years as a text publication, the Review was changed to an HTML format. One more major change is in the works.
As of April 2008, the RootsWeb Review will become a monthly publication; you will receive your copy on the second Wednesday of every month.

Although the frequency will change, you will still get the same great Review you’re accustomed to. Jana Lloyd, Mary Harrell-Sesniak, and Joan Young will continue to contribute articles to the Review, and we will continue to keep you up-to-date with the latest and greatest at RootsWeb. And of course we still want to hear your experiences with family history: your stories, tips, photographs, and the fun and interesting things you come across in your research. In addition, we will also be adding a short, new section with genealogy how-to tips.

If you’re anything like us, you receive tons of e-mail everyday, and it is sometimes overwhelming to sort through it all, let alone read it. We hope that by changing the Review to a once-a-month publication we will reduce some of that e-mail overload while still keeping you as up-to-date as ever with what is happening on RootsWeb.

Look for one more weekly issue on 26 March and for the first monthly issue of the Review on 9 April.

There has been a lot of discussion regarding the post from Tim about the domain change and I wanted to follow-up on some of the miscommunications that are circulating.

- www.rootsweb.com will still bring you to the RootsWeb homepage after the domain change.   We will be redirecting all of the old URLs.

- We are not changing anything on RootsWeb other than the URL.  We will still offer the same features and support.

- RootsWeb is now and will remain a free online experience.

- Your data will not be taken away from you.  We host the mailing lists, message boards, sites etc. but you own the information that you post or upload.

- As some of you found out, some URLs on the www.rootsweb.ancestry.com domain will already work.  This was necessary as we were testing the new URLs and preparing for the change.

If you have questions that I haven’t addressed please send them to feedback@rootsweb.com.

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.

As we’ve looked at data on how the new links to surname facts and message boards have been used we’ve found that a significant number of people are finding value in the links and taking advantage of them.  We believe that these links are proving to be helpful for users who may not already know about many of the resources available to them.  Our hope is to be able to continue to provide benefit to these users without creating a negative experience for others who are not using the links.

We appreciate the constructive feedback that we have received regarding the new linking feature on the message boards and have made a few improvements to the links as a result of your feedback.  To improve the accuracy of the links you’ll notice that we have tried to identify terms with greater accuracy, blocking words that may be surnames but are more often used in other contexts.  Another modification is that the pop-up box that appears when you move your mouse over a link doesn’t appear immediately so it’s not a distraction if you’re not intending to use the link.

The newest improvement that we made today is the addition of a new link in the pop-up box that says “turn off links.”  This will turn off all of the automatic links in message board posts for the full duration of your visit to the message boards.  For anyone frustrated by these links, we hope that this helps improve your experience on the message boards.