Ancestry24

» see ancestry24.co.za as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I missed this one for the plainest possible reason, which is that genealogy sites are not really internet products. They are national archive products with a web page in front. Ancestry24 was built on South African paper: church registers and estate files at the Cape, the records that got kept because somebody in a colonial administration decided which people were worth writing down. None of that touches a family in Ankara. There is no version of me that was ever going to open it.

Media24, the Naspers print arm, put it online in 2004 and it was the first commercial genealogy site on the continent. The work behind it came from Heather MacAlister, a family history researcher in Cape Town, which matters more than it sounds. Genealogy databases are only as good as the person who knew which shelf to go to, and the whole value of the site was somebody having done that walking already.

What you got was a search box over more than three hundred separate databases and a set of tools around it: a free family tree builder, forums, a learning section for people who had never done this before. still. The subscription bought you the deeper record sets. The rest of it was open, which is how it ended up being the place South African researchers pointed each other at for most of a decade.

~ the record ~

~ what was in it ~

Births and marriages and burials, the ordinary spine of any genealogy database, and then voters lists and the slave records at the Cape. That last category is what makes a South African genealogy site a different object than an American or a European one, because a meaningful share of the surviving paper exists precisely because people were being counted as property (close enough). A database like that is a research resource and it is also evidence, and the two uses do not always sit comfortably in the same search box.

The forums were the other half. Genealogy is one of the few things on the web where a stranger will spend an unpaid afternoon looking something up for you, because the person asking is usually stuck on exactly the record the person answering already found last year. Ancestry24 had that, and it is the part that does not survive an acquisition.

~ how it ended ~

The closure notice went up under Heather MacAlister's name and set 28 February 2013 as the date. No further new content and no new subscribers, and no more development on the family trees people had spent years filling in. Anyone holding a premium subscription was refunded the whole amount, which is more than most shutdowns manage.

The notice would not say where the records were going. The line was that the data would go to a good home, that nothing would be lost, and that the new custodian had all the paperwork and would be in touch. People in the comments asked directly and got the same answer. That is a strange thing to read when the thing being transferred is your own family's paper trail.

~ what the records were worth ~

In October 2013 the answer showed up. Ancestry.com had bought over four million South African records out of the site and was folding them into a catalog that was already somewhere north of twelve billion. The records were not lost. They were moved behind a bigger paywall run from Utah, and the country-specific site that had gathered them stopped existing.

That is the actual shape of this death and it is worth being clear about it, because it is not a startup failing. Media24 ran a working service for nine years, built an archive nobody else on the continent had, then sold the archive to the largest buyer in the category and closed the front door. The domain still answers. There is nothing behind it.

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