Rootsweb is going away! (At least Rootsweb as we know it....)

Question

Ancestry is shutting down Rootsweb in April.  Some contents will be retained (but may be unavailable for a few months) and others will be lost.

Here are the details from https://support.rootsweb.com/s/article/Retiring-and-Migrating-Portions-of-RootsWeb:

Mailing Lists Archives (last updated in 2020) will be retired on 6 April 2023 and migrated to an alternative, free platform. Once migration is complete, we’ll provide a link to them on the RootsWeb home page.

WorldConnect family trees (last updated on 9 August 2021) will be retired on 15 April 2023 and migrated to Ancestry as a new free-access collection later in the year. For help removing a tree or its content, contact us.

Hosted websites will become read-only beginning in early 2024. At that time, all logins will be disabled, but hosted sites will remain on RootsWeb as static content. Website owners wishing to maintain their sites must migrate to a different hosting provider before 2024.

Liz Shifflett posted several G2G notifications about these changes in February, but I don't believe that her posts conveyed a sufficient degree of alarm. Based on past experience with Ancestry's changes to Rootweb, I expect that many resources that we have cited as sources or otherwise relied upon will be going away (and many others will get new URLs, with no redirects from the old URLs).

For more information, see: https://dna-explained.com/2023/02/19/ancestry-to-delete-worldconnect-trees-and-shut-down-rootsweb-mailing-lists-prepare-now/

And those earlier G2Gs:

• https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1540328/worldconnect-family-trees-notice-found-rootsweb-family-tree
• https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1541259/rootsweb-archiver-mailing-lists-going-away-too
• https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1547285/do-you-have-sources-at-rootsweb

Comments

Thanks for posting this Ellen. It has been pinned to the top of G2G.

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hmm, this is going to take a lot of work to track down all the profiles using rootsweb as a source.  

Meanwhile, for those not aware of it, Ancestry bought Geneanet a year or two ago.  Both are remaining ''independent'' sites for the present, Geneanet actually has a little function to disallow sharing of one's tree on there to Ancestry.  If not clicked, then it's accessible on Ancestry.  How long the 2 will remain separate this way is unknown.

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Thank you for that comment Danielle!

I used to use Geneanet a lot, but have not been to the site in a long time.  I will have to check and see what I may still have out there!

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As I read the section on Hosted Websites, it seems like the only change is that they will become read-only.  I guess the concern is that some people will take down their content?

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M. most likely all the URLs will change too, not necessarily being linked to follow to the new ones.

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It's also possible that hosted websites will go offline for some period of time.

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I have a huge archive of web pages over there, representing my early family research. I've started copying some of it here, and other things to Google docs (at least for now).

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Personal opinion .... Decades ago a family member who keeps their family tree private, warned me about posting data and family trees on the internet and I ignored her.  Now it concerns me that Ancestry has and is developing a monopoly on data by buying up small independant developers (i.e. Find-a-grave) who had offered their web sites to us for free and to whom we donated our hard work and data for free.  Now Ancestry sells my work and photographs, and some of its members (sometimes) incorrectly transcribe my data into some distant branch of their tree at no seemingly benefit or to gain some kind of status.  Granted the former developers had a right to sell their sites (and our data) and that was a risk I/we took, but we the donators get nothing and have to pay an astounding membership fee to view our own work.

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hi Daniel, it's not just Ancestry that is doing this, MyHeritage is also doing the same, it basically boils down to ''market share'' for them.

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We received the note from rootsweb that the hosted site will become read only. I appreciate it can still be seen, but do you have any other recommended hosting sites that we could transfer it too? Is there anyone offering rootsweb a simple transfer procedure? 

Answer 1

We received the note from rootsweb that the hosted site will become read only. I appreciate it can still be seen, but do you have any other recommended hosting sites that we could transfer it too? Is there anyone offering rootsweb a simple transfer procedure? 

Answer 2

Thanks, Ellen. And yep; a lot of online communities and mailing lists have been buzzing. There's a vast amount of data out there, and it's not all necessarily easy to find if you want to try to capture and archive it. We'll be reliant on Ancestry's altruism to retain some of it, and the change probably will wreak a bit of havoc across WikiTree when links used in citations go away.

One recommendation might be to use Google to locate as many of the profiles you manage as possible that mention RootsWeb. The following search string should work:

rootsweb "YourOwnID-12345" site:wikitree.com/wiki/

Then we can at least, as a quick measure, Wayback any links on those profiles and include those URLs in the text.

If nothing else, I think this is a good reminder that, in reference citations, a link is always secondary. What's most important is a fully-formed citation that, as Elizabeth Shown Mills tells us, both documents the specific location of each piece of data, and records the details that affect the use or evaluation of those data ("...we often need to discuss issues relating to a source's quality and content, not just it's identity and whereabouts"; Evidence Explained, 3rd Edition, section 2.3, page 41).

Comments

Thanks for the best answer star, Renee. Just to add that I had a few spare minutes and took my own advice. A compilation of RootsWeb freepages pertaining to one of my ancestral surnames had been maintained up through circa 2013, so I decided to begin capturing all those links to the Wayback machine.

The very first one I tried netted me this message: "The capture will start in ~23 minutes because our service is currently overloaded."

Waybacking may require a healthy dose of patience.

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and donations!

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In case Google has not indexed all the relevant pages, you can also try this WikiTree Plus search:

https://plus.wikitree.com/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=Domain%3Drootsweb_com+Manager%3DYourOwnId-12345

Again insert your own WikiTree ID in place of YourOwnId-12345 (leave "%3D" as is); click "Get Profiles"; and note that the data may be up to a week out of date.

If the Wayback Machine is inadequate, consider trying

https://archive.today/

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Excellent. Thanks for the WikiTree+ search syntax, Jim. I think using both may be useful. Google found me one where I'd left comments but am not a profile manager, but I do want to archive a source mentioned there.

I really need to do a deeper dive into using WikiTree+, but if someone was interested in a particular surname and wanted to see about shoring up with an archival URL any RootsWeb.com citations or mentions, would this be the appropriate syntax:

https://plus.wikitree.com/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=Domain%3Drootsweb_com+LastNameatBirth%3DThrelkeld

Replacing "Threlkeld" with the surname of interest?

If correct, that seems like it might be a good way to go about it since the same RootsWeb.com source citation might be used on multiple profiles in the same family branch, and the search might be particularly useful for those with one-name studies.

And, Liz, thanks for the donation reminder. Yep; I use the Internet Archive a lot, and they get a little something from me at the end of each year (they're a registered 510(c)3 corporation, so donations are tax deductible for U.S. citizens).

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That WikiTree Plus URL looks good to me, Edison.

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@Edison: My latest error message from trying to save a rootweb page on the Wayback machine is:

Error! Please try again in ~43 min. Crawling this host is paused because they notified us that they are overloaded right now.

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I think I had some tree(s) there, though am sure they are now outdated, as I have only in last several years finally found the names of some of my actual ancestors. Of course, the wrong trees I made before were either apparently correct at the time, or less complete. The errors have been repeated in various trees...

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You can also use cc7=anywikitreeID to check for domain on persons relatives like

https://plus.wikitree.com/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=Domain%3Drootsweb_com+CC7%3DThrelkeld-42

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Very cool! Thank for that, Aleš. I'd seen the "CC7" operator at Help:WikiTree Plus, but wasn't quite sure what it did. But it spreads the net wide for seven generations, doesn't it? Very useful.

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Ales! Thanks for search function!

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I have done the searches and found the profiles with the rootsweb links.  Would someone please explain the Wayback procedure?  I have never done that before, and would like to fix these profiles before it is too late.  Thank you.

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Hi, Cheryl. I've gotten into the habit of "Waybacking" most every link other than FamilySearch and ones using the WikiTree external source templates like those for Ancestry.com records and Find a Grave. What I usually do--which is by no means any sort of WikiTree guideline--is to include the original URL in the citation, followed by the Wayback URL. Ends up looking something like this:

Henson, Margaret S. "Anahuac Disturbances." The [https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online ''Handbook of Texas Online''] ([https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/anahuac-disturbances link to article at the ''Handbook of Texas''], accessed 19 January 2022; [https://web.archive.org/web/20220119215810/https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/anahuac-disturbances link to an Internet Wayback Machine archive], captured 19 January 2022); article last updated 8 September 2020.

To get the Wayback URL is super simple. Go to https://web.archive.org/. Copy and paste the original URL into the field up at the top that contains the prompt, "Enter a URL or words related to a site's home page." Click the button or just press Enter to continue.

If the page has already been archived, you'll get a calendar-like display showing you how many times its been filed away. Click a year that's displaying a vertical black bar and that will take you to the calendar for that year.

The dates of successful captures will inside blue or green dots; a yellow/orange dot or other color means that there was problem with the capture or that the original website reported a "file not found" when someone attempted a capture.

Hover your mouse over a blue or green dot and you'll see the times a snapshot was taken on that date. Click one.

The archive page will load into your browser. In your web browser's address bar--usually a long field near the very top--will be the full URL to that page at Archive.org. Click in that field and copy the text (Ctrl+C on a Windows machine; Command+C on a Mac). Now you've got the link and can paste it wherever you need. In Windows, use Ctrl+V to paste...and I think it's Command+V on a Mac; but don't hold me to it: I can't even spell "Mac". 

If the URL you pasted into the Wayback Machine has never been archived, you'll get a prompt telling you so, and a button to click so that you can proceed with creating a new archival snapshot yourself. After it completes, you can click on the link presented to view and confirm the results, and then copy the link the same way as described above.

You don't have to create an account or be logged-into Archive.org to do any of this.

Hope it helps!

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Hi Edison,

Thank you so very much!  I'm heading off to give this a try.  With your directions, it should be a success!  Thanks again.

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You can also get a list of all profiles of your (or anyone else's) ancestors that contain a reference to rootsweb by using Ancestor Explorer and doing a Bio Text search for the word rootsweb.

Answer 3

A brief philosophical discourse about the "...as we know it" part of the posted question: Back in the pre-Ancestry era, I consulted the rootsweb site frequently. I was a genealogy rookie, and it was a great place to find a lot of relevant data collected in one place. It also had a pretty robust search capability that worked well. Most of the profiles were not sourced, as I recall, but there was enough info to provide great clues, and it didn't take long to learn which contributors did good, solid, well researched work and published data you could trust.

The Rootsweb as we knew it then was a great resource. The Rootsweb as we know it in present tense is pretty much useless IMHO. Much of what was once there seems to have disappeared, and it's a lot more difficult and time consuming to find relevant data. Presumably Ancestry's intent was to rid the online genealogy landscape of a very useful and popular and free resource, and the mission was largely accomplished, so I'm not sure shutting down the "as we know it" form is necessarily a bad thing.

I know many of us expected the same fate for Find A Grave, which didn't materialize, and many of us (well, me anyway) were quite surprised to see free image sharing links (that sometimes actually work, sort of). So you wonder if the tiger can really change its stripes and the free-access tree collection and "static" hosted web sites will actually be useful things where you can find relevant data. I certainly hope so, because it's really a crime to trash all those thousands of hours of work that many volunteers accomplished years ago. But I remain concerned that "Ancestry's altruism" that Edison says we're relying on might be a fantasy concept.

Comments

I'm much less concerned about my own family pofiles than I am about the overall condition of WikiTree.

A few years ago we went through a prolonged period when all of Rootsweb was offline while Ancestry tinkered with configurations, then when Rootsweb was restored, a lot of it was gone. And the projects I'm involved with still have responsibility for myriad old profiles (mostly inherited from Gedcom imports) that cite mailing lists, worldconnect family trees, and other rootsweb resources that have not been accessible for years because they were lost in that or other previous Ancestry reorganizations. I spend an inordinate amount of my time repairing links on the profiles of other people's ancestors that turned bad when URLs in formats like freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com were changed to formats like freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com or freepages.rootsweb.com. (Most of these are errors that don't get picked up as Data Doctors suggestions. They often can be fixed pretty easily, but it seems like very few WikiTreers know how to do so.) I hate to think that even more of our time is going to spent on the unproductive activity of cleaning up after Ancestry's technical changes, much less chasing down the sources of information underlying profiles that other people contributed with citations to Rootsweb resources.

In its current shape, Rootsweb still has plenty of excellent resources, such as cemetery lists and local records transcripts created by local genealogy volunteers (example, https://sites.rootsweb.com/~nyrensse/gbrcmh.htm), large well-researched personally-maintained websites like https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~brouwergenealogydata/genealogy/index.htm, and those mailing list archives that haven't already been lost. Past experience leads me to expect that the volunteer groups and individual site owners responsible for many of these resources are not going to manage to do whatever they need to do to keep their material online. And even if they do succeed in keeping it, the URLs probably will change, with no redirects left behind.

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It looks like almost 92,000 profiles are using rootsweb.com in their profiles.

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Well, 92K out of 33.7M profiles is less than 0.3%, so from that standpoint it doesn't seem too outrageous.  But it's still a whole lot of cleanup if many of them have broken links, and I won't be surprised to learn that many of them are old profiles with profile managers who are no longer with us.

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but you also can't count how many of the 33.7M profiles have no sources on them or only family trees.  If you consider that, it is a much higher percentage.  rootsweb is another unsourced tree, but this could be a serious issue when that information that may be on profiles that many people adopted disappears, also.  Just like anything else, it can be a 'hint' to correct information.

I still think that the majority of truly unsourced profiles do not have the Unsourced template on them, so they are not being counted as Unsourced.

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I think that search string is only getting the rootsweb.com domain name. Just in the last couple of hours I've edited several URLs that still had rootsweb.ancestry.com as the domain (those are URLs that haven't worked for a long time).

Answer 4

Just one MORE example of ancestry building a monopoly by buying VALUABLE website and shuttering or castrating them! MyFamily & RootsWeb to name two, will FindAGrave be next?!   STOP subscribing, I never did and NEVER will, ALL they care about is $$$, not genealogy!!!  They will NEVER get one penny from me.

Comments

I understood Ancestry.com bought Find-a-Grave.

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They acquired Find a Grave in 2013, in fact.

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I knew ancestry bought FindAGrave several years ago, wasn't exactly sure the date, but was speculating on when they would RUIN it like they did the others. MyFamily was shuttered, and Rootsweb was CASTRATED.  They WERE valuable collaboration resources, now gone!!! I do not like the changes they have made to FindAGrave.

Answer 5

I started my online genealogy with Rootsweb, back when it used listserv e-mail system (ROOTS-L). I want to say early 1996, the first e-mails I find right now are 1997, older e-mails are probably only printed.

It was useful to talk to people also researching the same people or area, and to get an idea of what sources were out there. To get actual data, it was best to send them a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope). Sometimes we would exchange GEDCOMs (once I put enough data on my computer to be worthwhile), at least once by snail mailing floppy disks.

After Rootsweb was bought by Ancestry I basically stopped using it. That was also when I started going to the local LDS FHC (Latter Day Saints - Family History Center), ordering microfilms and microfiches, getting my own data directly. Having paper copies of the actual census and other records was always best to me. One of my first things I found was that a story about my own family was false, so I knew better than to just trust other people.

Comments

Some of the old lists were amazing and I still use some of the extracts that were posted there. (Mostly diaries and similar papers that aren't normally in databases and are harder to find.) Of course, I have them archived and linked to the Wayback Machine now. I'm trying to remember if there's any I've missed.

Answer 6

I went through all of my profiles and corrected the links, added links to the Wayback Machine and grumbled the entire time.  Ancestry has done this before and will do it again.  

Thank you, Ellen for letting us know.  Thank you, Jim for making it easy to find the profiles.

Answer 7

I have an 85 year old 4th cousin in very poor health who has a large family tree at RootsWeb that she has been building for decades.  In the early years, she had the help of many older family members that have now died, making the tree an invaluable source of their memories of the family.  I told her today about RootsWeb going away and asked if she was interested in having the tree on WikiTree.  She is interested, and also wants a way to share DNA information, which I told her is also is a good fit for WikiTree.  She only uses an iPad, and I don't know how to help her to move her tree quickly to WikiTree.  Would very much appreciate some guidance.  Thank you.

Comments

Ooh, 85-year-old, iPad only. That doesn't sound like an easy combo.

I didn't see instructions on how to export a GEDCOM from Rootsweb. Once she has that file, she could import it to WikiTree or send it to someone (like you) to do at your leisure. A GEDCOM import is done one profile at a time, so it would take some time to do. Hopefully there would be overlap with profiles already present, that makes it go faster. You still have to find the matches though.

Supposedly you'll still be able to access WorldConnect trees now on Rootsweb, but I'm not sure I trust it. From their site:

Where can I find the WorldConnect trees?
The trees will be migrated to Ancestry as a new collection. The collection will be free to access without an Ancestry membership.
 

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Thanks so much.  I will ask if she is able to make the GEDCOM file.  If so, I'll be happy to do the transfer.

Answer 8

I'm having trouble getting to the tree on RootsWeb in some cases, for example this ancestor: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Harris-6062 the first source (and four others) are trees on RootsWeb that I'd like to capture on the Wayback archive, if possible, but I'm not having any luck.  I'm reaching this RootsWeb index page: https://wc.rootsweb.com/ and when I try inputting the ID number, as near as I can figure out from the link it would be 1437456, I receive an error message that says "Gedcom does not exist."  Has the entire tree to which this link refers already been removed?  Thank you for any insight.

Comments

Yeah; there may be a problem there. That link in the profile (and the others similar to it) is:

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=geer%5Ffamily%5Ftree&id=I437456

The %5F bit is what replaces an underscore in URLs. So the GEDCOM name should be "geer_family_tree" and the "id=I437456" part means individual "profile" 437456 in that GEDCOM. And... The GEDCOM geer_family_tree is linked from within other trees at RootsWeb, but it doesn't exist on RootsWeb; in fact, there is no GEDCOM with the word "geer" in the name.

I located a webpage on Genealogywise for the gentleman who created that GEDCOM at RootsWeb; it even links to it--er, where it used to be--from this page: http://www.genealogywise.com/profile/SamuelTaylorGeer.

My best guess is that the GEDCOM was removed from RootsWeb some time ago. I tried a quick Google for any "Geer" GEDCOMs that contained the surname Harris, but the search results were, at best, inconclusive.

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Thank you so much for all this helpful information, and for solving this puzzle for me!

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There are a couple trees called "geerfamily" or "geer_family" but no "geer_family_tree."

See:
https://wc.rootsweb.com/index/G?page=3

The search function seems to barely work, and for some reason the first set of gedcoms in the index have their own order.  You have to use the next button to access the rest of them which do appear to be alphabetical.  To jump ahead instead of going page by page you can just update the url.

Answer 9

This is going to be awful. I was just looking around at a lot of GenWeb pages, and many are hosted at Rootsweb. That's a lot of valuable information to be lost, unless they find other places to host their information.

Answer 10

So Archiveteam (a group of volunteers that archive dying websites) is very aware of RootsWeb's stuff going down in April. Fortunately, at least for the mailing lists, a WARC was made in 2021 by them (information on WARC files). That being said, you should still save all content you have in the Wayback Machine.

I do this basically every day, so I do have some tips. 

1) If possible, make an account on Archive.org.

(This is what it looks like when not logged in).

I prefer to use it with my account, as I have several more features. 

(The save outlinks, save error pages, and save screenshot options are the ones that I use the most. Also, a WACZ is a WARC file that is sent as a zip file.)

As you can see, this saves a lot of time. Also, saving a screenshot can be incredibly important, as sometimes, all of the embeds (so pictures, etc) do not load in the saved link. 

For example, here is one that I just saved.

This part shows up, even if you aren't logged in.

(Link to snapshot) (Link to screenshot)

PLEASE note that you are only allowed a certain number of active Save Page Now sessions. Also, you can only save a URL once every 45 minutes. That includes if it is saved as an outlink. Not all outlinks are saved so please check!

2) The Wayback Machine browser extension is amazing. You should be able to find it on at least Chrome and Firefox (I use one for personal stuff and one for work, I have it installed on all my browsers). I believe it is on other browsers too. 

This is particularly useful as it has many settings. You can choose to Save Page Now directly from the page you are on. 

You also can choose an "automatic archive" function. I have mine set to automatically archive everything if it has not been saved in the last 7 days. (Though I can manually archive it if I so choose).

 

It is also really nice that they exclude URLs. They actually have a default list they save, you can add to it if you so choose.

Luckily, there is also a private mode, so you don't have to worry about EVERYTHING being saved.

I especially like this as it will automatically save anything I am viewing for genealogy purposes, including trees, Wikitree pages, and a ton of other things. Please note that archive.org can't really get through a lot of paywalls (so stuff like Ancestry is kind of a nightmare, but sometimes it works!).

Bonus: if a URL no longer works and they have it archived, it will give you the option to view an archived version of the site.

3) You can also email Save Page Now! It will save all of the links in the email -- unfortunately without outlinks. If you're in a rush, though, and just want to save the links you got in an email, you can forward the email to savepagenow(at)archive.org and it will save those links. Here's a blog post they had about it. 

You will receive an email back from them about it, I do recommend either deleting those emails or sending them to a folder you make specifically for save page now emails. Sometimes if you get errors the system will email you a few separate times -- they process it a few times to make sure that they saved all of the links. 

Here's an example of an email I have gotten from them recently:

Personally, I do two things with the Save Page Now email address. 

One, I forward all of those Wikitree emails I get to it. This saves all (or almost all) of the profiles that are linked in there to the Wayback Machine, making them a trusted citation. I also forward all the blog posts I get from peoples genealogy blogs. 

Two, I occasionally just copy entire webpages or make very long lists of links and email them to the SPN email. This is super useful, especially when it comes to my next point.

4) Sitemaps. You can either find the sitemap for a website or generate one yourself if the website is small. Usually it is called sitemap.xml, but sometimes it is called other things. I generated one for the rootsweb page I linked earlier. Here's a neat link about how to find a sitemap. (This is for people who own the websites, but you can do a few of the options on that list). A neat thing about sitemaps is that they basically have every single link for the website on them, which means that is VERY easy to 1) archive the sitemap itself in the wayback machine or 2) copy the links and send them to the SPN email, saving each link individually. (You have to do 2 if you generate your own sitemap for the site).

Luckily, it only looks for links, so you can put in something like this (or something even more busy) and it will figure it out:

I seriously -- like, seriously -- recommend making a sitemap for a smaller genealogy website. There are free sitemap generators -- most have a cut off of 500 pages. 

I used sitemaps to save my father's Rootsweb pages a year or two ago, as well as his new genealogy website. It was very worth it, especially as a large number of Wikitree profiles mention his old Rootsweb site. 

5) Other options. The Wayback Machine is not perfect. For some websites, they do not allow you to archive their content on there, or the paywall stays up after archiving. Personally, if I catch a website doing that, I usually try and archive with a different website. My preferred one is archive.today, which is currently being hosted at https://archive.ph/.

Comments

I had to truncate this for length unfortunately so I didn't cover all 8000 of the topics I wanted to.

Also fun fact: If you are saving a twitter profile link in the wayback machine (with account) an option comes up to "Archive up to 3,200 most recent Tweets from this Twitter profile". It will email you the results.

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I just...

I can't begin to...

Liz, you don't know how much it warms my heart to see someone besides me hit the G2G per-post character limit!

And there is a ton of great information here. If WikiTree itself doesn't consider making a Help page about use of the Wayback Machine (Wikipedia has for some time now recommended its use in reference citations in order to avoid the very thing we're talking about, "link rot"), then I vote that you consider turning this into a FreeSpace page where members can access it one place, and can then link to it when the Wayback Machine or webpage archival comes up in G2G discussions and elsewhere. And the FS page can offer more latitude for presentation, images, and linking. If I can help with that in any way, I'll volunteer.

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Oh that sounds fun!! I haven't thought about that. If WT doesn't make one I definitely can. (I feel like  I've nerded out about the Wayback Machine before (though that is the only recent example I can find), it's a site I use literally multiple times a day every day. 

Also (re: character limit), amazingly I haven't hit it before! I am usually pretty long winded lol and I love the pictures as examples thing. 

Doesn't help that this is a topic I know too much about haha! 

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Now I'm sorta crestfallen. I thought I'd found a loquaciously simpatico spirit who, like me, had run into the character limit so often that it was now second nature to accurately judge just by screen scrolling when a post needed to be split into two.

But I still very much think such a web archival how-to guidance would be helpful to a lot of genealogists. If WikiTree produces a Help page, I think it will, perforce, need to be a Reader's Digest edition (for those under 40, that means a condensed, abridged version). A FreeSpace page could be the full version, and it could also be turned into a guest-authored post on my blog (and you could offer it to other bloggers) for additional exposure. Or if you have a YouTube channel...

Timely and perennially useful information.

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A free-space page maintained by users that could be linked to from the newsletter/help pages/g2g/etc would be good.

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Thank you, Liz, for the tips.  They are greatly appreciated!

Answer 11

The question about preserving PDF's online came up.  I found these instructions.  It sounds like there's a special process to preserve a PDF if the live site its on disappears:

https://culis.columbia.edu/content/dam/staffweb/units/bscdg/Archiving%20PDFs%20using%20the%20Internet%20Archive%20Wayback%20Machine.pdf

Answer 12

I just discovered something ...

http://sites.rootsweb.com/~vabrunsw/varecord/g-names.htm (no longer available, 20 March 2023)

BUT

http://www.rootsweb.com/~vabrunsw/varecord/g-names.htm - an older URL, given by Delores in an entry in her tree, Ancestors of Richard S & Delores S (GREEN) WILLEY, was captured...

https://web.archive.org/web/20050220030903/http://www.rootsweb.com/~vabrunsw/varecord/g-names.htm

So... if "sites.rootsweb" give you the bull in a pasture pic, try it without "sites."

Answer 13

We received the note from rootsweb that the hosted site will become read only. I appreciate it can still be seen, but do you have any other recommended hosting sites that we could transfer it too? Is there anyone offering rootsweb a simple transfer procedure?