RootsWeb WorldConnect

» see wc.rootsweb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

WorldConnect was the place amateur genealogists put their work when they wanted somebody else to find it. You built your family tree in desktop software, exported it as a GEDCOM file, uploaded that file, and from then on your dead relatives were searchable by anybody on earth with a browser. No membership and no account needed to read it. By the end there were more than 465 million names in it.

Its own history page dates the launch precisely. RootsWeb announced WorldConnect on 10 November 1999, after a four-week test during which staff and users submitted 5.5 million records, which tells you how much material was already sitting on hard drives waiting for somewhere to go. The idea had been circling since 1994, when a group calling itself GenWeb started arguing about whether family history and the internet belonged together, and programmers spent the next few years working out how to turn a GEDCOM into something a web page could read.

Where I am, the family tree arrived from the opposite direction. In February 2018 the Turkish state put ancestry records on e-Devlet, the government services portal, and the country went for it hard enough to take the service down. Nobody uploaded anything. The state already had the registry, going back generations, and what it opened was a window onto its own files. The American version of this is 465 million names typed in by volunteers and given away for free, and the Turkish version is a login to the population registry. Both are family trees. Only one of them could be deleted by a company.

Because that is what happened. RootsWeb was founded in 1996 to connect genealogists on a young internet, and in 2000 it was bought by what was then MyFamily.com and is now Ancestry. The acquisition did not kill it. It took twenty-three more years, and it happened one feature at a time.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the sunset, feature by feature ~

Ancestry retired the RootsWeb Surname List in 2017 and the mailing lists in 2020. In February 2023 it announced the last big piece: the mailing list archives would close on 6 April and the WorldConnect trees would be removed on 15 April, to be "migrated to Ancestry later in 2023". In early 2024 the whole of what remained was made read-only.

The trees were already frozen before any of this. WorldConnect stopped accepting updates in 2021, so for the last two years of its life it was a very large static file that still answered search queries. There had been an earlier injury too: a 2019 reformat dropped the notes attached to entries and left the source citations incomplete, which for genealogy is the part that makes a tree worth anything. By the time the service was removed, a lot of what had made it useful had already been quietly taken out of it.

~ the index as it last looked ~

The final capture of the front page is from 12 April 2023 at 19:17 UTC, three days before the deadline, and the notice is sitting in the markup: "Note: WorldConnect family trees will be removed from RootsWeb on April 15, 2023 and will be migrated to Ancestry later in 2023." Below it is the browse interface, which is twenty-six letters and ten digits, and under A is the actual inventory.

Read that list and you are reading filenames. "A.Orbom-Ohlsson.3 July 2017.good.GED - 26 June 2021" sits above "A.Orbom-Ohlsson.1 April 2021", which is the same family uploaded twice because the second attempt went better. "ARhea ged_AutoBackup2_2020-05-07" is somebody's automatic backup, uploaded as-is. "AAAMay2020" was named to sort to the top. "AJHoke (2020-09-23)" and "AB-Iron County Families.GED - 19 April 2021" are two people's filing systems meeting in public. Nobody renamed any of it, because the index was never designed to be read as a list, and for twenty-three years that was the whole charm of the thing.

~ where the trees went ~

wc.rootsweb.com answered 200 for the last time on 12 April 2023. By 1 May it was a 302 to the RootsWeb home page, and from July through September it returned 503 on every crawl, which is a load balancer still politely answering for a machine nobody turned back on. Today both rootsweb.com and wc.rootsweb.com return 403 with a two-byte body, the whole of which is a pair of empty JSON braces.

The data was not destroyed. The trees went into Ancestry as a collection, free to search, and an index of WorldConnect remains reachable from inside the company's own site. That is the modern ending for a public resource: not deleted, just relocated to somewhere with a login screen and a brand on it. The RootsWeb wiki article that supplied the launch date is still on the Wayback Machine, and the permanent link it prints at the bottom of itself points at an Amazon load balancer hostname. The granddaddy of genealogy sites could not keep a stable address for its own history page.

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