The Best-Kept Data-Superpower Secret on the Web RootsWeb is one of the older sites on the Net, and has one of the densest data collections, but it gets very few props. Almost all of the (we're talking terabytes here) data is a.) free; b.) user-contributed. It was open-source and public domain when Linus Torvalds, bless his soul, was still muddling through high school. Sugar-daddy site
Ancestry.com does a lot of advertising, but you hardly ever heard about homely, brilliant RootsWeb. RootsWeb hosts many of sites that make up the
WorldGenWeb Project, a loose network of genealogical and historical data repositories organized by locality, from the
AfghanistanGenWeb through the
USGenWeb all the way to the
ZimbabweGenWeb. Rootsweb's
Social Security Death Index UI is excellent--use it to search for a record amongst 70 million available. The
WorldConnect database offers up the family trees of 298,212,965 people. Remember the domain, because after this when you Google, you'll be impressed (I believe) by how many content-heavy sites are hosted by RootsWeb. Any other RootsWeb-hosted sites that MeFites enjoy?
posted by jengod
on Oct 7, 2003 -
12 comments
