I have tried to stay out of this thread, buttttttt. On one of the other lists someone posted a message from Brian Leverich, who with his wife, Karen Isaacson were the founders of RootsWeb. Brian said the contract of sale held no promise that RootsWeb would remain free. In 2005, at the NGS conference, the Ancestry / RootsWeb folks asked a RootsWeb lunch meeting what those of us there thought about a premium service that would have a fee. Those present basically told them they would be shooting themselves in a very tender place. I have never been happy with Ancestry's marketing methods, or the way they have harvested genealogical date from the people who post both at Ancestry or RootsWeb. In my opinion the only thing that justifies my special subscription is the census records, that is just about all I have access to. Additionally, much of the information found there is extremely unreliable, anything found there MUST be independently verified. For those of you with similar feelings to mine, I suggest you join the Family History Library's indexing project. The FHLIP is currently indexing the US census records among many other things. There are more than 115,000 volunteers working on the project. I have almost done 4,000 records myself since Christmas. It usually takes me 20 minutes to do one census page. Once all of the information the FHL has on microfilm, has been indexed and made available on line for FREE, Generations Network / Ancestry / My Family will be a moot point. Personally, I think they are trying to make a killing before their boat sinks. If you are interested, here is the URL: https://www.familysearchindexing.org/en/index.jsp Marleen Van Horne

I was not going to make any further comments about RW-Ancestry, etc., but think perhaps some clarification and further information is in order. TGN (The Generations Network) owns Ancestry, My Family, Rootsweb, Genealogy.com, Family Tree Maker: http://www.tgn.com/default.aspx?html=overview Last fall Spectrum Equity, a venture capital firm, bought into TGN bringing along $300 million dollars in new money. Venture capital firms have one motive --money making, increasing revenues in the companies they invest in, making them run more efficiently and economically. Whether it's genealogy or electronics, their objective is to turn a profit and then get out. Divisions of a company that do not produce revenues are either cut off or absorbed into the divisions that do .. like RW being absorbed into Ancestry. RW has not had any staffers of its' own for quite some time (perhaps more than a year)--it uses Ancestry's staff to keep things rolling. And I'd be kinda surprised if anyone on this List noticed any substantial diferences in RW during this past year. The change for right now is a visual change with urls going from rootsweb to rootsweb-ancestry and all sites that have been housed on RW servers will be branded, i.e., will have a banner identifying it as part of the Ancestry Community. Here's an example of a freepage at RW with the header & footer banners: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~apsmith/ This is the user policy for user submitted data on Ancestry: By submitting content to Ancestry, you grant The Generations Network, Inc., the corporate host of the Service, a license to the content to use, host, distribute that Content and allow hosting and distribution of that Content, to the extent and in that form or context we deem appropriate. The quesion in the minds of people (and other genealogy organizations) who have sites on RW-Ancestry servers is: what do 'use' and 'distribute' really mean? Does it mean that any data on those servers is able to be put into the fee-based areas of Ancestry? Or made available (distributed) on cd's or other for sale collections? That is why many sites are moving off RW-Ancestry servers. Right now TGN/Ancestry, etc. are maintaining that RW will remain a freely accessible genealogy resource and all people can do is hope that continues. But of course no one should depend on that being a forever kind of thing as business decisions to change operations are made all the time. Also there are other alternatives for contributing your data to genealogy groups that will keep it freely accessible -- USGenWeb in particular. http://www.usgenweb.com/ Kathi Jones-Hudson, National Coordinator Tombstone Transcription Project http://www.rootsweb.com/~cemetery/index.html ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping

Thank you Marleen. If anyone is upset by Ancestry.com, this is a method to combat some of their tactics and help people who cannot afford the census subscription. I had not been aware of this project by Family search. I have volunteered and hope that a lot of the people on this list volunteer also. This is a good way to help our genealogy community. If we all put a little time on this, this project will be done quickly. Thanks again for the information. Jean Adams Marleen Van Horne <msvnhrn@jps.net> wrote: I have tried to stay out of this thread, buttttttt. On one of the other lists someone posted a message from Brian Leverich, who with his wife, Karen Isaacson were the founders of RootsWeb. Brian said the contract of sale held no promise that RootsWeb would remain free. In 2005, at the NGS conference, the Ancestry / RootsWeb folks asked a RootsWeb lunch meeting what those of us there thought about a premium service that would have a fee. Those present basically told them they would be shooting themselves in a very tender place. I have never been happy with Ancestry's marketing methods, or the way they have harvested genealogical date from the people who post both at Ancestry or RootsWeb. In my opinion the only thing that justifies my special subscription is the census records, that is just about all I have access to. Additionally, much of the information found there is extremely unreliable, anything found there MUST be independently verified. For those of you with similar feelings to mine, I suggest you join the Family History Library's indexing project. The FHLIP is currently indexing the US census records among many other things. There are more than 115,000 volunteers working on the project. I have almost done 4,000 records myself since Christmas. It usually takes me 20 minutes to do one census page. Once all of the information the FHL has on microfilm, has been indexed and made available on line for FREE, Generations Network / Ancestry / My Family will be a moot point. Personally, I think they are trying to make a killing before their boat sinks. If you are interested, here is the URL: https://www.familysearchindexing.org/en/index.jsp Marleen Van Horne ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to PABUCKS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message