Guild Blog Challenge Post 2: Another demise - Rootsweb Mailing Lists

Like many family historians who began researching in the 'nineties' and 'noughties', the Rootsweb Mailing Lists were a prominent feature of my early research.  They enabled me to learn about areas of the country that my ancestors had lived in, to find out about events, such as Family History Fairs, which were taking place in those areas and which I might be interested in attending, to locate distant cousins around the world and, perhaps best of all, to discover things I would never have even thought of looking for, or asking about.

All nicely delivered to my Inbox.

Over the years, I marvelled at the trials and tribulations of the founders, Brian Leverich and Karen Isaacson and rejoiced each time a bit more 'security' was obtained to keep the systems running.

So it was with some sadness that I heard that the Rootsweb Mailing Lists are finally being closed down on the 2nd March 2020.

But the demise does not come as a surprise - and, although it might be easy to blame Ancestry for not continuing to support the lists, it is true that List usage has dropped dramatically.

The current archive system doesn't make it easy to see exactly how many messages were posted when, and so a few 'reply' messages might not be included in the figures I have extracted, but the following graph gives some idea of the numbers of messages posted on the PARRY Surname List since the list began:

The main peaks were in the first decade - with the second decade seeing a distinct tailing off. Of the 211 months between Jun 1999 and December 2016, 48 passed with no messages. Although there were supposedly 65 subscribers, very few ever posted and, out of the 1286 messages which appeared on the list, the majority (886) were actually posts gatewayed from the associated PARRY message board.

This was one reason messages virtually ceased after March 2015, as the gateway had to be closed after the format of the posts from the message board went awry.  People still posted to the message board - but mailing list subscribers no longer saw those messages unless they visited the board.

So, whilst I have always preferred mailing lists, it appears that the message boards suit many other people better and probably function more effectively.

Highly active lists that were hosted on Rootsweb, such as that of the Guild of One-Name Studies, have transferred elsewhere but I see little to justify setting up such a list for PARRY researchers.

And maybe I am not so sad anymore - there are other features still available under "Rootsweb", and the Ancestry Message Boards will (hopefully) continue to be maintained long into the future.  The internet is also a different place now, with many other sources of genealogical information and places where communities with common genealogical interests can be built.

So I am sure that what I enjoyed when I first began my genealogical journey, that "culture of volunteers working together, to make resources freely available to the general community" will continue on.




Sources
The History of Rootsweb - http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~socgen/history.html

Dick Eastman, writing about Rootsweb, having won the award for "Best Genealogy Site on the Web" in 2000 - http://www.eogn.com/archives/news0049.htm

Rootsweb Home page with details about the end of the mailing list functionality, as well as links to the other features still available - https://home.rootsweb.com/

PARRY Mailing List Archives - https://lists.rootsweb.com/hyperkitty/list/parry.rootsweb.com/2020/1/

PARRY Message Board - https://www.ancestry.com/boards/surnames.parry/mb.ashx