AYER-L Archives

From: Liz Wallis <>
Subject: [AYER] Repost of Rootsweb announcement
Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 14:53:00 -0400

Sent this a couple of days ago and it never showed up, so I'm resending it.


Hello all, sorry I've been so quiet lately, real life intrudes, daughter in
hospital, business keeping me running, etc, etc. I'm hoping things will
ease off a bit this summer and let me get back to family history for a change.

Some of you may already know that Rootsweb has entered into a financial
arrangement with MyFamily.com, one of the 'doing business as' names of
Ancestry.com. Here is the announcement that Rootsweb sent to its mailing
list and board administrators, straight from the horse's mouth, so to
speak. I don't have any special information beyond this, but do have
contacts if anyone has any particular questions.

I do want to say that I have been a happy subscriber to Ancestry.com for
almost a year now and I think very well of the resources they are
providing. I would have been very disappointed to hear that it was any
other company Rootsweb were aligning themselves with.

I'm posting this note to all the lists I administer, and I know some of you
are on more than one of them, so I apologize for you getting it multiple
times.

Liz Wallis
List Admin
- --------------------------------------------
Good News, Bad News, Good News: The Merger of RootsWeb and MyFamily.com

Good news: You, our list and board administrators, have played a very
special role in making RootsWeb one of the largest and most popular
sites on the Internet. In May, we had over 149 million page views
(according to Nielsen NetRatings combined home and work statistics),
sent over 155 million e-mails, and handled over two million downloads
of files from the various archives hosted at RootsWeb. Everyone, take
a bow! This is an incredible community of genealogists, and the
advances we're all making in our research due to the sharing that
occurs here is unprecedented. Without you, it couldn't have happened.

Bad news: The more popular RootsWeb becomes, the more costly it is to
simply stay alive and online. Expenses continue to exceed revenue.
We ran up a truly scary loss last year. Without outside help, it's
not clear how long we'd be able to go on like this.

Good news: MyFamily.com (you may know them better as Ancestry.com)
recognizes the importance of the genealogical community that has grown
here at RootsWeb, and wants that community to continue to thrive.
They're excited to provide the financial stability we need to ensure
RootsWeb will be around for years to come.

Brian and I are pleased by Ancestry.com's coming involvement with
RootsWeb. Now we can all focus on helping each other on the mailing
lists and message boards, uploading our GEDCOMs, and building Web
pages to share our research.

More good news: Nothing will change for you, no one is going to charge
you to use RootsWeb. You'll still find RootsWeb at www.RootsWeb.com.
Everything you're used to using will still be here: the 19,000 mailing
lists, the hundreds of millions of names in free genealogy databases,
the interactive learning guides, the weekly RootsWeb Review and
Missing Links, the numerous tools for tracing your family history, the
tens of thousands of message boards, the thousands of independently
authored web sites. RootsWeb will still support worthy genealogy
projects and societies, such as the USGenWeb Project
(www.USGenWeb.org), the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild
(ISTG.rootsweb.com) and the FreeBMD Project (FreeBMD.rootsweb.com),
and other groups that provide free genealogical resources.

And don't worry, you won't be charged to access RootsWeb. No one
will put your data on CD without your permission. Our Privacy Policy
(http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/pledge.html) and our Acceptable User
Policy (http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/aup.html) are unchanged.
Other promises made over the years will continue to be honored. You'll
still deal with the same RootsWeb volunteers and employees. In
fact, most users won't notice any changes, except exciting new tools,
more content, and better genealogical resources.

If you would like more information, please check out our
official press release at

http://www.ancestry.com/home/celebrate/rootsrelease.htm

Thanks again for your support! Now, let's go figure out where
great-great-grandpa really came from, before that UFO deposited him in
rural Indiana in 1848...

Karen

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• [AYER] Repost of Rootsweb announcement by Liz Wallis <>