RootsWeb was founded in 1996 and has had an extraordinarily long and successful run, outlasting nearly every other website originating in those early days of the internet. RootsWeb has far exceeded its founders' expectations regarding longevity and its central role in creating an online genealogy community, but maintaining RootsWeb forever is not a viable long-term solution. We recognize the valuable genealogical information RootsWeb offers and are working to keep that community knowledge alive by migrating it to Ancestry and other places throughout 2023.

Mailing Lists Archives (last updated in 2020) will be retired on or around 1 May 2023 and migrated to an alternative, free platform. Once migration is complete, we’ll provide a link to them on the RootsWeb home page.

WorldConnect family trees (last updated on 9 August 2021) will be retired on 15 April 2023 and migrated to Ancestry as a new free-access collection later in the year. For help removing a tree or its content, .

Hosted websites will become read-only beginning in early 2024. At that time, all logins will be disabled, but hosted sites will remain on RootsWeb as static content. Website owners wishing to maintain their sites must migrate to a different hosting provider before 2024.

1. Open an FTP client (like FileZilla) and connect to:
   • Host: sf​tp://sitesuser.r​ootsweb.c​​om
   • Port: 22
2. Enter your username and password and log in. Your username is the website name and can be found at the end of the URL (example: https://sites.rootsweb.com/~username/). For help with your password,  or .
3. Use your FTP client to download your website’s files. See instructions for some popular FTP clients .