Rootsweb's New World Connect

After more than twenty years of maintaining my family tree at Rootsweb, I asked today that it be removed. Rootsweb has always been, in my genealogy life, a free web site that facilitated collaboration in researching our family histories. They hosted message boards dedicated to any name or locale or genealogy subject you could request, they hosted e-mailing lists dedicated to these subjects (at some point these were tied together), they provided free web space to individuals and groups, and they allowed users to post their GEDCOM family trees so they could be searched and viewed by other genealogists. It grew rapidly and overwhelmed the volunteers who created the site, so it was turned over to Ancestry.com, a fairly new company that sold access to databases of genealogy records, and was starting to create Rootsweb like features to enhance their service, under the agreement that it would always remain free. I used to use Rootsweb all the time.

So it was a little sad to have my tree removed. For about two years Ancestry has been updating WorldConnect, nominally to make an old site secure in today's internet environment. But I just got a look at the new WorldConnect. It was very hard for me to find my own tree. The search function doesn't find people in my tree, or finds so many people in so many trees, apparently ignoring middle names and birth dates and places etc, that I don't find it useful. And once I did find my tree, there is no mention of me (who collected this data over the past 25 years), nor any way for people to contact me. On the plus side for some, I guess, it does suggest records that might help that are available with a subscription to Ancestry ?

I will probably try to upload a new GEDCOM there to see if it will allow people to contact me, etc. It could be that they just loaded all the old GEDCOM files and the researcher contact information is not part of those files, so is not available. I'll also keep looking for an alternative. I'd rather it be free. It must be findable to the whole genealogy community, not just paid subscribers of a particular service. It must have protections against wholesale downloading of information. And protections against other people just adding things on to my tree. (Many people have a lower standard on what constitutes proof of relationship and I've seen lots of people added on to my family that I know to be false. So I suppose I'm protecting my "brand"; if it's in my tree, you know I can explain why, and the why is pretty solid.) It must allow attribution and contact information. I would prefer to be part of a greater community that will attract researchers who might then find a connection to our tree. (But I may also just host a tree on my own web site and rely on Google to lead genealogists to me.)