Greetings,
I am confused by the posting below. On all of the other rootsweb based
mailing lists the discussion (if any) has been about a buy our of
rootsweb.com by
ancestry.com. Your message could be interpreted to mean
that
rootsweb.com was split into multiple parts.
I have seen very little discussion on any of the rootsweb mailing lists
about the buyout. Of course when an organization, such as rootsweb,
has financial troubles there is little choice but to seek a bail out or to
close. I have been a paid subscriber of
ancestry.com for some time
now and my own experience has been that it does not even come close to
rootsweb in terms of capabilities. Essentially, after I found that
the social security databases on Ancestry were not being maintained/updated
in a timely fashion I started using the rootsweb database, which
I have already found to be the most current. The databases on both ancestry
and rootsweb are both a long way from being very useful. I have
never found a single match, except the SS death database on ancestry. What
has been the most help in my experience is the rootsweb
listservers. Exchange of information among researchers has provided me with
incredible amounts of new data whereas pretty much
everything else (searching Ancestry databases) has been a waste of my time.
The other comment I can offer about
Ancestry.com is that they are running
Windows NT servers that cannot possibly handle the Web load
required to support their current customers. I have a 2 million bits per
second cable modem and I may as well take a long nap if I
query some of the Ancestry databases. I have written Ancestry several times
to suggest that they need to substantially upgrade their
equipment (like Sun SPARCservers coupled with real databases like Oracle)
but of course it is far cheaper for them to simply let
the customer suffer bad service.
Like everyone else I will observe this merger for a while to see if
Ancestry.com actually produces the capabilities necessary to support
their customers. Right now I have a doubting Thomas view and am very
disappointed to see that rootsweb could not obtain a grant
or financing. I had debated uploading my data to rootsweb for free and now
I am very glad that I did not do so. Private corporations,
such as Ancestry, are enticing genealogy researchers to rip off themselves
because the value added by these companies is no where near
the cost and difficulty of the original research itself.
We should start writing our Congressional representatives to ask that a
copyright protection mechanism be provided to the
researchers of the data; not the companies that simply "value add" to the
raw data by placing it on a CD-ROM with a simple search engine.
Cheers,
Jason Canon
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carol C-H" <cch(a)netdoor.com>
To: <CANNON-L(a)rootsweb.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 24, 2000 12:32 PM
Subject: [CANNON] LISTOWNER POST - please read
Cousins,
As you were notified a couple of days ago, RootsWeb is now a part of
MyFamily.com. I see no reason to expect this to affect our list in any
way, since both RootsWeb and MyFamily have said prior agreements will be
honored.
If you want to take advantage of the free 14 day membership to
Ancestry.com, I understand that you need to sign up before July 5. A
link
to the sign-up page is on my website - please bookmark it for future
reference; in addition to links, I try to post relevant info when changes
occur affecting the list - those of you who were listmembers when we moved
to RootsWeb because of the Maiser server crash in May, '97, remember that
was the reason I originally set up my homepage - for us to keep in touch
while we figured out what we were going to do. I still don't use any
graphics, banners, counters, etc., so that you can access it quickly and
easily.
Carol <cch(a)netdoor.com>
http://www2.netdoor.com/~cch/
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