Rootsweb - FREE and WONDERFUL data

I posted a list of my Top 10 favorite genealogy web sites here back in April. Number 2 on my list was the Rootsweb Genealogical Cooperative.

My humble opinion is that the www.Rootsweb.com suite of products and services are the best FREE genealogy resources on the Internet. I use the following all the time:

1) WorldConnect database - over 480 million names (some duplicated) in over 400,000 databases (some duplicated, all user-submitted, at http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/

2) Rootsweb/Ancestry Message Boards -- over 161,000 boards, with 17 million posts - at http://boards.rootsweb.com/

3) Social Security Death Index - 79 million names - at http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/

4) Free Web pages at Rootsweb - these include the FreePages (user-submitted), regional resources (including genealogy society) and other pages - at http://www.rootsweb.com/~websites/ There is a surname index when you click on a first letter range.

5) USGenWeb Archives searching - at http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/newsearch.htm

6) Rootsweb Mailing List Threaded Archives at http://archiver.rootsweb.com/.

7) Rootsweb Mailing List Search at http://searches2.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl

8) Surname Resources at Rootsweb at http://resources.rootsweb.com/surnames/

9) US County Resources at Rootsweb at http://resources.rootsweb.com/USA/

10) The Rootsweb Guide to Tracing Famly Trees - articles at http://rwguide.rootsweb.com/

These are all very useful FREE resources that anybody, at any experience level, can use effectively to search for research performed by others. The USGenWeb Archives are the only resource listed that provides transcriptions of primary information, however.

Have you used the Rootsweb databases to their fullest? If not - try them out and you may be pleasantly surprised.