A popular commercial genealogy website is quoted in a recent news story as saying it attracts an estimated 1.3 million visitors each month. However, those figures pale in comparison to what is taking place on RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative, the bastion of free online genealogy information.
According to Dr. Brian Leverich (co-founder, with his wife Karen Isaacson) of RootsWeb, it now has about 1.3 million Web hits (or about 550,000 page hits) per day on the more than 3,100 independent genealogical Websites and more than 4,000 independent locality and surname mailing lists it hosts.
These figures include more than 100,000 searches of its online databases, including the massive Roots Surname List (RSL) and various other databases, such as the Arkansas, Louisiana, and Wisconsin General Land Office Records to 1908.
RootsWeb (http://www.rootsweb.com) is the Internet's only user-supported genealogical server. It provides a free or very low-cost home for many genealogical activities and projects. Among the more than 3,000 independent Websites hosted by RootsWeb are:
-- Cyndi's List
-- USGenWeb and the USGenWeb Archives
-- WorldGenWeb
-- Roots-L State Pages
-- IIGS (International Internet Genealogy Society)
-- Olive Tree
Factoring in the traffic the genealogy mailing lists produces, RootsWeb had between 6 and 7 million visitors in July, according to Leverich. Those figures make RootsWeb larger than ZDNET.COM, which was ranked tops by Business Week magazine in its August 17 issue with Web activity of 5.9 million visitors in that same period.
RootsWeb's archives of genealogical data is currently equivalent to about 2.5 million pages, and is growing rapidly. Moreover, the 147,000 users of RootsWeb's mailing lists exchange more than 3 million messages around the world -- each day.
ROOTS-L, the granddaddy of genealogical mailing lists including the RootsWeb Surname List, began in late 1987. Today, according to Isaacson, the RSL, a descendant of ROOTS-L, is one of the most popular features at RootsWeb. In addition to the search engine for RSL, there is an online form for researchers to submit their surnames of interest for inclusion in the database. Projections are that RSL will pass the half-million mark on surnames this month. Almost 70,000 researchers have submitted their surnames. Is one of them a cousin of yours? You can find out by visiting this site: http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/searches/rslsearch.html.
RootsWeb is supported by donations from its users and a commercial sponsor. While all of RootsWeb databases and mailing lists are open to the public, selected services that are conveniences, such as automatic notification when your surnames appear in new material uploaded to RootsWeb, are available only to paying RootsWeb users (classified as members, sponsors and donors).
Other services that are expensive to provide (like personal Web space or Web serving of personal GEDCOM files) are available at a nominal extra cost to private sponsors. Donations range from $12 per year for a member up to $124 per year for a donor requesting up to 100 megabytes of webspace. Compared to many commercial websites currently charging $5 per month ($60 per year) RootsWeb offers an attractive alternative.
Leverich believes that next to pornography, genealogy sees the most action on the Web -- even more than sports or gambling. Further supporting that belief is the popularity of RootsWeb Review, its weekly e-zine (at http://rsl.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/rslsql.cgi), which premiered June 17. RootsWeb Review now has more than 212,500 subscribers around the world, and at its current growth rate should reach 500,000 by the year 2000.
(c) 1998, Los Angeles Times Syndicate
Myra Vanderpool Gormley and Julie Case are co-editors of Missing Links, a free weekly genealogy e-zine. To subscribe, send your request to: Missing Links Newsletter
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