Earlier this year, an online resource for Canadian and American genealogists, called Cornwall Roots, shut down without notice. Word has it the owner of the website was no longer willing or able to maintain the website.
Cornwall Roots was a site that contained thousands of obituaries from Ontario, Quebec, and New York, from 1900 to 2008, and photos of almost 60,000 headstones in cemeteries in Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec.
To help prevent other genealogy and family history websites from disappearing when the owners can no longer maintain them or don’t want to continue paying hosting fees, the Ontario Genealogical Society (OGS) has come up with possible solution.
Canada’s largest genealogical society is offering to host genealogy websites at no cost to the owner. The owner can continue to administer the site as long as they want. When the owner no longer wants to continue, or cannot do so, OGS will host the website and display its content to keep it available for researchers for decades to come.
At this time, the society’s primary concern is to preserve sites about Ontario genealogy resources and family history, but they will consider all websites.
Responding to questions in an email message, OGS President Steve Fulton, UE wrote, “Our willingness, of course, is to preserve Ontario sites first, but if there is risk of loss, we would find a home for any site.” He added, “There are many types of websites and each scenario has to be evaluated first for size and demand on the society’s servers and volunteers.”
As OGS works on the details of this new initiative, some of the scenarios being considered include:
- Complete transfer of the personal website and URL to OGS. This means the site will be moved to the society’s servers and remain there static for people to research.
- Transfer of the website to the OGS servers. The owner continues to administer and revise the site.
- The website owner continues to host the site as they are doing now and develops an arrangement with OGS to transfer the site in the future.
There will be no cost for this service to website owners, but OGS will ask if they can place Google ads on the site to help the society generate income to pay server and hosting costs. The ads will be “tightly controlled so they are relative to the mandate of the society.”
This venture is not new to OGS. They are already supporting and preserving Canada GenWeb Cemetery Project, A Living Past about Port Hope, Ontario, S.S. Nerissa, and Norcross.
Website owners interested in learning more about this initiative are invited to send an email to OGS Director David Thompson at director1@ogs.on.ca.