Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Ancestry Message Boards

I suppose 20 years after purchasing the great Rootsweb free genealogy site, Ancestry would like all of it's users to be paying Ancestry users and is slowly throttling Rootsweb. My supposition. In recent years, there has been a huge decline in Rootsweb use. Perhaps this is because serious genealogists are now all subscribing to different services - Ancestry, MyHeritage, etc. - and are now using their member-only message boards, essentially fencing themselves off from the greater genealogy community. I just posted a message to Rootsweb and received an almost immediate comprehensive response. Now I see that my post to Rootsweb is automatically posted on Ancestry's version of the same message board, but the helpful very informative reply was posted only to Ancestry's version, though shared with me, the author of the original post. In other words, others researching this family will not see the information unless they are Ancestry members, so will need to post their own queries. This makes the public Rootsweb message boards much less useful. Intentionally, by Ancestry, I would guess. I think this is unfortunate for what used to be an open genealogy community. Sigh.

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