Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Top 50 Genealogy Sites for 2010

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The ProGenealogists, Inc. company released their list of the Top 50 Genealogy sites today - the press release introduction says:

"ProGenealogists, Inc., announced today that it has again identified the 50 most popular genealogy websites, updating an important and useful tool for the world’s family history searchers. This year’s list shows some significant changes from 2009, reflecting shifts in the importance and popularity of some websites. While many well-known sites remain on the list, seven sites moved into the top 50 from lower positions; while one site did not even exist for the last list."

The 50 Most Popular Genealogy Websites for 2010 now includes the "movement" in the Top 50 from 2008 to 2009 to 2010. The selection criteria were not listed in the 2010 press release, but there was a link to the Digital Genealogist magazine (now defunct) where the criteria was provided. I found the 2008 article by Kory Meyerink here, which provides the ranking process and criteria.

Who's #1 on the genealogy hit parade? Why, Ancestry.com, of course.

But who's number 2? A surprise, since the website has no historical data, doesn't permit a GEDCOM upload, users cannot search it for potential cousins, but it has a lot of traffic because millions of people put an average of 5 family members on the Facebook application once upon a time. While it certainly has traffic rankings, http://www.familylink.com/ is really pretty useless for most genealogists.

The only website on the list that I have not visited and used is FamilyTiez.com, described as "A site where families can establish their own pages to share news, photos, events and genealogy with each other." It was #30.

The listings for the commercial database and family tree sites have some surprises after Ancestry.com being #1:

5. http://www.genealogy.com/ (down from #2 last year)
9. http://www.onegreatfamily.com/ (was #9 last year)
17. http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/ (down from #10 last year)
19. http://www.genealogybank.com/ (up from #41 last year)
29. http://www.kindredkonnections.com/ (was #19 last year)
32. http://www.heritagequestonline.com/ (up from #39 last year)
37. http://www.footnote.com/ (down from #8 last year)
41. http://www.archives.com/ (new to the list this year)

The highest ranking "newcomers" to the list were:

9. http://www.usgwarchives.net/ (which split off from USGenWeb.org, which fell to #56)
27. http://www.genealogybuff.com/
30. http://www.familytiez.com/

There were no genealogy blogs on the list again this year. Of course, traffic to genealogy blogs cannot be measured by unique visits and page views on a web site because of the efficiency of using RSS readers. The 2009 Top 25 Genealogy Blogs were listed by ProGenealogists here.

What rankings on this list surprise you? Have you visited all of these sites? Do you use all of these sites? Which sites are useful to you, and which are useless?

1 comment:

Joy Fisher said...

The USGenWeb Archives did not "split off" from USGenWeb. We are still part of USGenWeb.

There is nothing "new" about us. We ares still providing millions of pages of genealogical information - free!

We welcome any and all data submitted by everyone.

The URL is not new either - we have been at the same URL for the past two years.

Joy Fisher
National File Manager
USGenWeb Archives