Roots Web Review

Membership Costs:

Searching your family tree through Rootsweb.com's WorldConnect Project is completely FREE. Alternatively you can be re-directed to the parent site, Ancestry.com (or Ancestry.co.uk if you live in the UK), but you will then have to pay their respective annual subscription fee.

Features of Roots Web:.

The WorldConnect program allows you free access 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.
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.
If you become a sponsor, you can have access to a personalised mailing list, which informs you when searches are made on your "registered names of interest".
You will have access to Message Boards with over 17 million posts on more than 161,000 boards.
RootsWeb houses links to tens of thousands of websites for the genealogy community.
Volunteer at RootsWeb or get involved in one of the hosted volunteer projects
Share your research with other users
Free Genealogy newsletters, with a searchable archive.
Use research templates to speed up the research process.
Take advantage of a wide range of free tools and resources.
Helpful community atmosphere, someone to help out is never too far away!
Excellent technical support and help through the FAQs and email support centre.
Buy genealogy related products from the RootsWeb Store!

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
Keyword

Users can also choose to search using Ancestry.com if they pay a site subscription. If users do so, the following search parameters are available:

First and middle names
Last name
Birth year
Death year
Birth location
Death location

A more advanced search allows you to search by the following criteria:

All of the above
Residences
Relatives
Marriage year
Gender
Race/Nationality
Key words
Use Exact or Ranged options
Prioritise a particular collection (e.g. US Records)
Limit Search to particular records (e.g. Census, MIlitary or Card Catalog)

Joining RootsWeb:

As there is no joining fee, you simply register (using your name, email address and password) and you're ready to go! If you are already a member of Ancestry.com, Ancestry.co.uk or Ancestry.com.au you are automatically a member of RootsWeb and can use all of the features without registration.

Editor's Verdict:

RootsWeb.com is a free site offering you links to many resources of information around the web. RootsWeb.com is part of Ancestry.com, and since RootsWeb is a free service, you can expect to find banner ads on most pages, many of which re-direct to its 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. With that said, for many users, the fact that the site is free will more than make up for these little annoyances!

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.

At first glance, using RootsWeb can be a bit daunting. The myriad of links that litter the homepage can be difficult to navigate at times, especially for someone new to online genealogy. 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. RootsWeb therefore seems less useful for the newbie genealogist, but more appropriate for a more experienced genealogist who can develop existing research and build on a partially completed tree. It is also ideal for someone who simply wishes to share their research with other members of the genealogical community. This is possible using the WorldGen facility featured on RootsWeb. For a beginner genealogist, 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. It is, however, a limited source only returning results where such information has already been researched and entered by another user. If you can afford the subscription to Ancestry.com, and particularly if you're new to genealogy research, then we suggest you take a look at what Ancestry.com has to offer instead!

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