RootsWeb Mailing Lists Closing Permanently

Question

The RootsWeb mailing lists--a communication staple for many years in the genealogy community--came back online in Q1 2018, after the acquisition by Ancestry.com had temporarily suspended them. As we know, much of the rest of RootsWeb never did come back online. Many of these email lists were surname oriented and one feature was that messages posted to the Ancestry forums were gatewayed automatically to the appropriate mailing lists. I have long managed two of the lists that are tied to my one-name studies.

The list administrators received word about an hour ago that the RootsWeb lists will be closing permanently as of 2 March 2020. Incoming and outgoing email services will cease, administrator log-in accounts will be discontinued, and the lists will be put "into an archival state." Existing messages are to remain searchable via RootsWeb, at least for the immediate future.

There have been valuable information exchanges on those lists over the years, some of it irreplaceable from family researchers now deceased. If you are a member of a RootsWeb mailing list and wish to archive messages of personal interest, I would suggest you consider doing so over the course of the next several weeks.

Comments

Edison, for those of us not very familiar with RootsWeb, but thinking we might still want to retrieve information (on our various surnames or whatever..), can you give us any search tips?

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Julie, the landing page for the mailing lists is here: https://mailinglists.rootsweb.com/listindexes/. The index listings are separated into four categories: Surnames: USA (geographical); International (geographical); and Other.

You'll see a significant number of the lists labeled as "inactive"; this means that, following the suspension of the lists shortly after the Ancestry acquisition and then their subsequent restart, the previous list administrator did not re-register in order to resume management of the list, and no new administrator adopted it.

Whether or not a given mailing list actually has archived messages is a hit-or-miss thing. Click on a link to go to a particular mailing list info section and you'll see a link under "Archives" to "browse or search the archives for this list."

The archives are browsable by year and month, and there is a rudimentary search function just above the header for the list. I say rudimentary because there is no advanced search option; it's a single field. Which is a good lesson to always write out, for example, the name of a state...if you search for "CA" you're going to get matches that include Catherine, Carter, Carolina, and California.  

The history--and sometimes the existing archives--of these mailing lists goes back to 1980. The suspension of their operation after the Ancestry acquisition seriously curtailed their level of activity, and it recovered only fractionally once they came back online in late March 2018. But still. The end of a 40-year-old era in genealogy collaboration.

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How sad to lose all that info 

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Thanks, Ed.  My fear is that this is just one step and that eventually the archives will disappear for good.  Over the years, I've occasionally been sent extremely useful information by various people who downloaded it from RootsWeb long ago.  So I suppose I should do all my searching now.  But what a job!  Along with the valuable stuff, there is (in my experience--not on your lists, of course  ) a lot of misinformation being spread around, and lots of stuff I don't care about, or don't know enough to care about yet.  It's also remarkable, and sad, that even when people published brilliant analyses on RootsWeb years ago, very little of that apparently made its way to Ancestry, FamilySearch, or WikiTree.

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at this late stage are lists (surname lists or whatever) able to be adopted and if so how

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Oh no! I don't have time to look and save all that good stuff, dang

Answer 1

1980?  I didn't realize it went back that far.  That was the start of Usenet newsgroups, which I heard about in the late 1980's. In 1994 I was introduced to NCSA Mosaic browser and life wasn't the same.  I subscribed to Rootsweb listserv at that time, and kept my contact info up-to-date until it was bought by Ancestry in 2000.  The listserv required some technical ability to use, but I was surprised by the number of "old" people using it at the time.  Old meaning retired or thereabouts, LOL.  At that time, I didn't personally know anybody over 30 who had an e-mail address.

Comments

Oops.  Thought I was adding to the comments, not making an answer.

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An answer is good, Rob. The topic was lonely without one. 

Yeah, I did a double-take on the date...and suspect that it is, in fact, incorrect. But for one of the lists I admin (er, used to admin) here's the bottom of the chronological list of archives by year:

There are two posts in that September 1980 folder, and a few in July 1986. But one of the posts in 1986 references an HTML page at the now-closed Bethany University...and I can pretty much guarantee there wasn't an HTML page at Bethany in 1986. Because we didn't see the first one until August 1991.

I was on USENET prior to that, and helped part-time admin a university's NSFNET exchange as well as their dial-up BBS system, but I somehow doubt RootsWeb included archives from the early USENET days. The 1996 date seems reasonable, though.

At least I didn't include that 1980 date in the original question. 

The RootsWeb listservs have been more active over this than they have been since the Ancestry message board cross-posting was turned off. Lists that haven't seen a message for three years have lit up. Time will tell if, in fact, the archived messages stay up for a while after the mailing lists themselves shut down.

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Rob, I was also surprised by that date.  I was working at Stanford University Hospital then, in the Finance Department, and e-mail was a special privilege only given to top management.  Two years later, when I worked in the Budget Department, we had only one computer for the entire office!  Word processing was just getting started, and only the secretaries were trained to use it.

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I know I joined Rootsweb in probably mid-to-late 1994, and it was pretty active at that time. They had a group for Germans-from-Russia, and groups for other areas I was researching.  I need to make sure I've save some data from there on my GFR line. Unfortunately it's not sourced, but it's still a good lead.

Julie - I remember about 1980 our school got a computer (basically a terminal that would connect to the mainframe at the university, using a modem with a telephone cradle).  They didn't know how to classify the computer, so it was labeled A/V equipment and put in the library. My mom was the librarian which gave me access to it. The problem was, our school only had two telephone lines. We used it after school, but even so we would occasionally get interrupted when the principal would pick up the wrong phone line to make a call.  In the next year or two we started getting Apple II computers.