Email From RootsWeb-Announce@rootsweb.com  to RootsWeb-Announce@rootsweb.com
Email Dated June 21, 2000

Good News, Bad News, Good News: The Merger of RootsWeb and MyFamily.com

Good news: You, our users, have helped create at RootsWeb one of the
largest and most popular sites on the Internet.  In May, we had over
149 million page views (according to Nielsen NetRatings combined home
and work statistics), sent over 155 million e-mails, and handled over
two million downloads of files from the various archives hosted at
RootsWeb.  Everyone, take a bow!  This is an incredible community of
genealogists, and the advances we're all making in our research due to
the sharing that occurs here is unprecedented.

Bad news: The more popular RootsWeb becomes, the more costly it is to
simply stay alive and online.  Expenses continue to exceed revenue.
We ran up a truly scary loss last year.  Without outside help, it's
not clear how long we'd be able to go on like this.

Good news: MyFamily.com (you may know them better as Ancestry.com)
recognizes the importance of the genealogical community that has grown
here at RootsWeb, and wants that community to continue to thrive.
They're excited to provide the financial stability we need to ensure
RootsWeb will be around for years to come.

Brian and I are pleased by Ancestry.com's coming involvement with
RootsWeb.  Now we can all focus on helping each other on the mailing
lists and message boards, uploading our GEDCOMs, and building Web
pages to share our research.

Better news: As a special thank you to those of you who have helped
make RootsWeb such a vibrant Internet community, Ancestry.com is
making the following offer:

  You are invited to visit Ancestry.com today and sign up for a FREE
  14-day trial with no obligation. You'll gain full access to all 600
  million names in more than 2,500 databases. Go to the following address
  to begin your free trial now:

  http://ancestry.com/subscribe/subscribetrialx.asp?sourcecode=G11BA
   http://ancestry.com/subscribe/subscribetrialx.asp?sourcecode=G11BA

  You must activate your FREE trial by July 5, 2000.

More good news: No one is going to charge you to use RootsWeb.  You'll
still find RootsWeb at www.RootsWeb.com.  Everything you're used to
using will still be here: the 19,000 mailing lists, the hundreds
of millions of names in free genealogy databases, the interactive
learning guides, the weekly RootsWeb Review and Missing Links,
the numerous tools for tracing your family history, the tens of thousands
of message boards, the thousands of independently authored web sites.
RootsWeb will still support worthy genealogy projects and societies,
such as the USGenWeb Project (www.USGenWeb.org), the Immigrant Ships
Transcribers Guild (ISTG.rootsweb.com) and the FreeBMD Project
(FreeBMD.rootsweb.com), and other groups that provide free
genealogical resources.

And don't worry, you won't be charged to access RootsWeb.  No one
will put your data on CD without your permission.  Our Privacy Policy
(http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/pledge.html) and our Acceptable User
Policy (http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/aup.html) are unchanged.
Other promises made over the years will continue to be honored.  You'll
still deal with the same RootsWeb volunteers and employees.  In
fact, most users won't notice any changes, except exciting new tools,
more content, and better genealogical resources.

If you would like more information, please check out our official press release at

Thanks again for your support!  Now, let's go figure out where
great-great-grandpa really came from, before that UFO deposited him in
rural Indiana in 1848...

Karen