FYI... Joe D. Deaver BellCoTX Coordinator http://www.rootsweb.com/~txbell ancestry@deaver.com ============================================== Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 04:59:52 -0700 From: RootsWeb-Announce@rootsweb.com Subject: Good News, Bad News, Good News: The Merger of RootsWeb and MyFamily.com Good News, Bad News, Good News: RootsWeb and MyFamily.com Merger Good news: You, our Donor and Donor Plus contributors, have played a special role in creating RootsWeb, one of the largest and most popular sites on the Internet. In May, we had over 149 million page views (according to Nielsen NetRatings combined home and work statistics), sent over 155 million e-mails, and handled over two million downloads of files from the various archives hosted at RootsWeb. Everyone, take a bow! This is an incredible community of genealogists, and the advances we're all making in our research due to the sharing that occurs here is unprecedented. Bad news: The more popular RootsWeb becomes, the more costly it is to simply stay alive and online. Even with your very generous support, expenses continue to exceed revenue. We ran up a truly scary loss last year. Without outside help, it's not clear how long we'd be able to go on like this. Good news: MyFamily.com (you may know them better as Ancestry.com) recognizes the importance of the genealogical community that has grown here at RootsWeb, and wants that community to continue to thrive. They're excited to provide the financial stability we need to ensure RootsWeb will be around for years to come. Brian and I are pleased by Ancestry.com's coming involvement with RootsWeb. Now we can all focus on helping each other on the mailing lists and message boards, uploading our GEDCOMs, and building Web pages to share our research. Better news: As a special thank you to those of you at the Donor and Donor Plus level, Ancestry.com is making the following offer: As a RootsWeb contributor, you are invited to visit Ancestry.com today and sign up for a FREE ONE YEAR SUBSCRIPTION with no obligation. You'll gain full access to all 600 million names in more than 2,500 databases. Go to the following address to begin your free subscription now: http://ancestry.com/subscribe/subscribetrialx.asp?sourcecode=G11BD <http://ancestry.com/subscribe/subscribetrialx.asp?sourcecode=G11BD> If you are already an Ancestry.com subscriber please call 1-800-595-1211 to extend your current subscription. Select option #2 - Order Service. You must activate your FREE subscription by July 5, 2000. More good news: No one is going to charge you to use RootsWeb. You'll still find RootsWeb at www.RootsWeb.com. Everything you're used to using will still be here: the 19,000 mailing lists, the hundreds of millions of names in free genealogy databases, the interactive learning guides, the weekly RootsWeb Review and Missing Links, the numerous tools for tracing your family history, the tens of thousands of message boards, the thousands of independently authored web sites. RootsWeb will still support worthy genealogy projects and societies, such as the USGenWeb Project (www.USGenWeb.org), the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild (ISTG.rootsweb.com) and the FreeBMD Project (FreeBMD.rootsweb.com), and other groups that provide free genealogical resources. You will of course still get all of services and benefits we promised you, such as mailing lists, banner-free home pages, and access to PML, the feature that scans all our mailing lists and message boards for the surnames you specify. And don't worry, you won't be charged to access RootsWeb. No one will put your data on CD without your permission. Our Privacy Policy (http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/pledge.html) and our Acceptable User Policy (http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/aup.html) are unchanged. Other promises made over the years will continue to be honored. You'll still deal with the same RootsWeb volunteers and employees. In fact, most users won't notice any changes, except exciting new tools, more content, and better genealogical resources. If you would like more information, please check out our official press release at http://www.ancestry.com/home/celebrate/rootsrelease.htm Again, thank you for you loyal support. We hope you enjoy your free Ancestry.com subscription, and we look forward to your continued patronage. Now, let's go figure out where great-great-grandma really came from, before that UFO deposited her in rural Kentucky in 1835... Karen