Since being taken over by Ancestry, Rootsweb has continued to lay dormant in a number of areas. Most specifically the forums. But one of their gold features was the storage of GEDComs from others. Especially older ones from those since passed on or no longer active. It was just one such link 10 years ago that caused me to discover my grandfather had changed his surname and led me to finally find his parents and grandparents. But now even the GEDCom section has all but died. It was bad enough when it went down for a year due to hackers getting into their archaic software. But now they seem to have made purposeful changes that all but make the tree portion of the site unusable. We have therefore purposely had the material of Roz Edson, there for 20 years, deleted. Our back-up of her original work has luckily been posted to the TNG GEN software on our site. We apologize. There are many emails of historic interest that have links into the database. But they were just no longer usable anyway with the change. We have many other members with links to their "trees" still on our site. Nothing we can do. There is no longer a unique tree link and capability to limit your view at Rootsweb to just a tree. So for these reasons, their material is all but useless. We do not have backup GEDComs of much of our members material, nor their account access, so we cannot delete nor re-host their work. Disturbing and saddened at this loss.
So why did we take this step? Best we can tell, Rootsweb people at Ancestry decided that they were no longer EU GDPR compliant with their posted data. They did three major things. One, anyone without an explicit death date was marked as living and made invisible. Two, they removed individual submitted trees as the top level entry point and buried any and all reference to the submitted trees. Third, they dramatically changed the user interface and removed many details previously visible. Lets describe each in more depth.
For uploaded GEDComs, they removed visibility for any record without an explicit death date. It is not enough that the GEDCom marked them dead. Or they had birth or marriage dates more than 100 years ago. Or that their children all had birth dates more than 100 years ago. None of that mattered. As many/most early records of people in the various databases are sketchy on details, this removed visibility of all information for them. Names or any other notes and information attached. For Roz's database, this appears to have knocked as much as 1/3 of her material offline and now invisible.
Just as big an issue is the removal of any context within another tree. You can only search for individuals. And individuals appear in a list without context of the tree project they are in. Almost an attempt to simply declare the whole database a one-world-tree without any attempt to link possibly common records. Without the context of the database, you are not aware the records found belong to Roz's entitled "Horr and Hoar's of North America" database. Previous links into the database now simply get to a simple, single individual search page. You can no longer limit the search to just inside a specific GEDCom of interest. it is just an uncategorized list of people with more limited information shown.
The new user interface dramatically lowers the information content previously displayed. Beside losing the family view, it loses all the special notes that were previously displayed. Not to mention the tree they were a part of (see above).
As Roz's database of over 80,000 entries was essentially unusable with these changes, and previous links were of no help , we basically chose to recover her account and ask her databases be deleted from the system. We will work to make our TNG GEN database more visible to search engines so her hard work for over 20 years is not lost on the community. And maybe will consider submitting it to one-name.org for archival service they provide there.
RIP Rootsweb.