Help – RootsWeb Message Boards Helped with Networking & is Still Useful for Hints

Back in the day before Ancestry and FamilySearch got so big with images of records and many family trees, we used sites on the internet such as USGENWEB and RootsWeb. 

Whenever I located a new residence for my ancestor’s families, I would check out the county page at USGENWEB for user-contributed content. The hosts for the sites would upload indexes, photos, maps, and other useful information about their county. Some counties had more information than others and often you’d see they needed a host for the county.

RootsWeb was another site with database indexes, family trees, and message boards. The message boards are still available, as Ancestry now hosts the site at https://www.ancestry.com/boards/. You can search on surname, place, or topic. In the past, it was a way to communicate with others who were researching the same families or places. 

It is where I met three other researchers of the Sievert/Freitag families. Four siblings arrived from Schneidemühl, Posen to Joliet, Illinois in the 1850s. We four researchers are descendants of those four families. Here is an example of one of the exchanges I had with someone about the Sieverts and Fidays (the name was changed from Freitag after arriving in the U.S.).

It was great exchanging information on what we knew about our own lines. We exchanged emails and most of our communication after that was by email. I wished I had printed out all the email exchanges but they were lost when we changed an internet provider.

So, even though these are old and the emails probably are dead, the exchanges can provide helpful information about families from people that may not be alive today, and likely do not have trees on Ancestry. Give it a try. Search on a surname and see what you find. You may just find a treasure.

#52Ancestors - Help (Week 31)

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