I'm sure many of you are aware that the RootsWeb Free Pages have been down for some time now. The source of this problem is with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Ancestry.com back on June 16th, which is addressed (to a degree) on the Ancestry.com Blog site (June 17th). As of today (June 23rd) there still seems to be problems with Ancestry.com's main website. There currently is an advisory banner at the top of the main page, and my own experience (today) is that the site is slow to respond. Ancestry.com is a privately held, for profit company (it was formerly a publicly traded, shareholder owned, for profit company). Among the subsidies it owns is RootsWeb which it (or more accurately the original parent company, MyFamily.com) acquired back in 2000. Over the years Ancestry.com has continued to support and provide free access to RootsWeb. The DDoS attack took down all sites maintained by Ancestry.com which includes sites and pages hosted by RootsWeb Free Pages. As of today, seven days after the attack, RootsWeb is still down.
Unfortunately many of the documents and pages, not to mention the Brouwer Genealogy Database, are hosted by RootsWeb Free Pages. Many of the links found in the posts on this blog (since 2011) link to pages hosted by RootsWeb. Currently none of them can be accessed. In addition I cannot access the account maintenance page used to upload or change the files that are responsible for what you find online. The "Abstracts of Early monmouth County Court Papers," documents (PDFs) are among those that cannot be accessed. Since I am still working with this set of files (probably just one or two more posts regarding them), I have posted the three to a new location online (a Google Drive account). So for the the time, at least these three can now once again be accessed.
Abstracts of Early Monmouth County Court Papers, Part I
Abstracts of Early Monmouth County Court Papers, Part II
Abstracts of Early Monmouth County Court Papers, Part III
All of the links for the original files which have the scanned images of the original documents, are not effected by the problem at RootsWeb. They were, and still are, available through the Google Drive account.
Ancestry.com has been placing periodic updates on their Facebook page.
Longer term, I do have some concerns with the possibility that Ancestry.com will drop RootsWeb. Recently the company did announce that they were "retiring" some services including Genealogy.com, which is also still down. Although there has been no mention of this happening from Ancestry.com, the recent events, both the announcement of the retirement of some services and the length of time it has taken Ancestry.com to recover from the DDoS attack, does not evoke a sense of confidence. In do course, I may have to relocate many of the pages that were originally hosted by RootsWeb. In the meantime, if and when RootsWeb is back up, I would suggest that you download and save and PDFs that you might have a particular need for. The day may come when they will no longer be available online.
BGB 420
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