Friday, May 02, 2014

Ancestry killing World Connect Trees

For many years Ancestry has owned Rootsweb, and as part of the deal they inherited the Rootsweb family trees. Gedcom files could be uploaded on either site (I preferred Rootsweb's interface for it's ease of use) and the tree would appear on both sites, with Ancestry having a superior search.

A year or so ago when Ancestry went to their new search, World Connect trees were no longer listed in the results. As of a few weeks ago, the direct link to my tree on Ancestry instead connected to the search page for Ancestry's "Public Member Trees". WC can now only be accessed through Rootsweb.

I am assuming Ancestry has removed all references to WC on their site in order to promote the Public Member Trees. That might be a preferred option for some people, as the on line application allows easy linking and display of records on Ancestry, such as census, war records or newspaper articles. Photos can also be uploaded, which is not available on WC.

But I'm an old fogey who wants to continue having my genealogy database on my own PC, using the program of my choice (Legacy Family Tree). While the Public Trees are good on multimedia, they are juch more difficult for me to navigate and find the person I am interested in. WC is very easy to search, and to display descendant and ancestor info for a given person.

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