What Happened to RootsWeb?

Among one of the greatest successes of the research world, this long-time destination for genealogists hosted websites created by individual contributors and societies, plus then-revolutionary databases. Best of all, the site was totally free and mostly volunteer-run. But, sadly, today RootsWeb is now frozen in the read-only status. What happened to the once-influential genealogy resource?

Founded in 1996 with a straightforward mission: to connect genealogists on the emerging Internet. In 2001, the site hosted several research resources, which have since moved to their own servers. Cyndi's List, Social Security Death Index, and UsGenWeb are just a few.

RootsWeb was purchased by Ancestry.com in 2000. A promise was made to researchers that access would remain free forever. Ancestry.com slowly consolidated the message boards and family trees.

At its height, RootWeb hosted more than 30,000 user-maintained websites, plus the WorldConnect database of more than 465 million names.

You can still use Rootsweb today, but as a read-only site.

• Visit user-submitted websites—those that still exist, anyway. These include collections of records and publications, plus dedicated pages for genealogical societies or places of interest.

• Consult WorldConnect family trees, which were last updated in 2021 and ultimately merged with Ancestry.com’s. That said, you can still search an index of WorldConnect trees, last updated in 2023.

• Read the RootsWeb Wiki (also known as the Ancestry.com Family History Wiki). Note that the guidance here is frozen in time and as such may be outdated. For example, two of the wiki’s primary sources, Red Book: American State, County and Town Sources and The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy (both produced by Ancestry), were published in 2004 and 2006, respectively.

• Research obituaries in the Obituary Daily Times Index. Like WorldConnect, this is also searchable at Ancestry.com.

Working around broken links in RootsWeb - don’t despair! You can maybe still access the content that was once there:

1. Search Google for the page name to see if another site now hosts that material. This may reveal the page at a different URL, either at RootsWeb or another site.

2. Use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to view an archived version of the page. Visit the Wayback Machine’s home page, then paste the page’s URL to see if the site saved a version of the page at some point in the past. Your mileage may vary, as the Internet Archive didn’t capture every page on the site.

3. Consult other resources to determine if records, advice, etc., once hosted by RootsWeb are now hosted elsewhere. For example: Google a genealogical society’s name to see if it moved its website from the RootsWeb server to a different one in the intervening years. Or see if a record set you once consulted on RootsWeb has been uploaded to another website.

Some places you may consider researching for more up-to-date research help:

Facebook groups, Genealogical and Historical Societies, Cyndi's List, FamilySearch, Ancestry.com.

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