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RootsWeb.com Review

Star Ratings: Search effectiveness : Ease of navigation : Features: Technical Support Help Files / Documentation : Ease of joining / registration: N/A Value for Money: N/A Editor's Overall Rating: Average User Rating: None posted

Joining Fee:

Searching your family tree through Rootsweb.com's WorldConnect Project is free. Alternatively you can be re-directed to the parent site, Ancestry.com, but you will then have to pay their annual subscription fee. Click here to read our review of Ancestry.com - Ancestry.com Review

Features of Roots Web:.

• The WorldConnect program allows you to search the family trees of other genealogists to try and identify any common ancestors you may have. You may also upload your own family tree to the WorldConnect program. The WorldConnect Project file currently contains more than 385 million names and this number is growing daily. As all this information is free the popularity of this database is sure to grow.
  
  
• You can search through various free indexes including a Mailing Archives Search containing more than 29 million mailing list messages.
  
  
• Access over 30,000 genealogical mailing lists.
  
  
• You will have access to Message Boards with over 17 million posts on more than 161,000 boards.
  
  
• RootsWeb houses tens of thousands of websites for the genealogy community.
  
  
• Rootweb.com is free to everyone all over the world so as more and more people around the world contribute information to RootsWeb.com, it will become of more use to genealogists.
  

• The WorldGen Web Project gives you free access to the extensive help and support on offer from the volunteers at RootsWeb. These are people whose hobbies include genealogy research. They help people all over the world research their family trees on a daily basis and they're on hand to help you! You can also volunteer yourself!

Performing a Search on RootsWeb:

A basic search on Rootsweb.com allows you to search by the following parameters:

• First and middle names
• Last name

Joining RootsWeb:

Editor's Verdict:

RootsWeb.com is a free site offering you links to many resources of information around the web. It is part of Ancestry.com, so you can expect to see a few links re-directing you to Ancestry.com's paid subscription service here and there. Since RootsWeb is a free service, you can also expect to find banner ads on most pages, many of which re-direct to the parent site at Ancestry.com. We found that some of these flashing banners get a little annoying at times when you're trying to concentrate on performing a search and it's sometimes hard to distinguish a banner ad from a legitimate link.

The main plus points about RootsWeb are firstly that it's free (which is great) and secondly that there are so many volunteers on hand to help you out should you get stuck. The information contained on RootsWeb is mainly the result of millions of other genealogists having uploaded their own family trees and sharing their genealogical research. You can access this information by searching the family trees through the WorldConnect program on RootsWeb. The search results you get may be a little hit-and-miss depending on how many other genealogists' family trees interact with your own, though as time goes by the information available through the WorldConnect program will only increase as more and more genealogists upload their family trees to the program. Nevertheless, you are very unlikely to be able to research your entire family tree using the WorldConnect program exclusively. To this end, RootsWeb has also provided links to many other free-to-use databases of information.

When you land on RootsWeb.com you're presented with what seems like a mish-mash of links organised under various headings. We felt that many of these headings and links would mean very little to the newbie genealogist. At first glance it all seemed a bit daunting. Where does one start to research their family tree on this site? Clicking the first link marked "Getting Started at RootsWeb" seemed like the best place to start. This takes you to an introductory page that explains the purpose of RootsWeb a little more clearly. It seems the main purpose of RootsWeb is to connect people so that they can help each other and share genealogical research. Most resources on RootsWeb.com are designed to facilitate such connections. Thus it seems that RootsWeb may not be the best place to start for a newbie genealogist, but may be the ideal resource for someone who's already started to research their family tree, possibly through our No. 1 recommended site, Ancestry.com, and has reached an impasse in his or her research and requires further help from expert volunteers in the field. It may also suit anyone who has finished their family tree (if such a task is ever truly complete) and requires more background information on some of their ancestors. It is also ideal for someone who simply wishes to share their research with other members of the community. In such cases RootsWeb can put you in touch with the right people through its WorldGen Web Project of volunteers, and will allow you to share your research through the WorldConnect program. It's true that newbie genealogists may also find the long lists of resources and database links on RootsWeb.com helpful, but not ideal we feel. For the newbie genealogist, the whole process of researching your family tree can seem like a daunting prospect, and RootsWeb will only be of limited help here. Instead, we highly recommend Ancestry.com, the most popular genealogy website in the world, which has helped thousands of newbie genealogist get started on their way to discovering their own ancestry.

The bottom-line is this: if you're on a budget and are unwilling to pay to research your family tree, then RootsWeb can be a valuable source of information. However, if you can afford the subscription to Ancestry.com, particularly if you're new to genealogy research, then we suggest you do yourself a favor, save yourself a world of time and frustration, and take a look at what Ancestry.com has to offer instead!

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