ROOTS-L: The Internet's First Genealogy Mailing List

ROOTS-L: The Internet's First Genealogy Mailing List: "ROOTS-L is a mailing list for people who are interested in any or all aspects of genealogy, anywhere in the world. We're the original Internet genealogical mailing list (our first messages were posted in 1987), and the largest. But that doesn't mean we're not interested in new faces, new queries, new knowledge. Please join us! "

ROOTS-L started out as a LISTSERV mailing list at NDSU in late 1987. Yup, that means we just celebrated our 11th anniversary!

Anyhow, after several contented years at NDSU, in August, 1995, we moved to the then new LISTSERV at eWorld. In July of 1996, the list again moved, hopefully for the last time (this business of moving mailing lists around isn't nearly as fun as they say, trust me!), to a SmartList mailing list hosted by RootsWeb. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but that was more or less the formal start of RootsWeb.)

The other major change was due to a poll taken in early 1996, which indicated an high level of support for the screening messages, to eliminate LISTSERV commands, reposted digests, etc. So after redesigning the system we use for screening to expedite the approval of messages and protect against losing them, all ROOTS-L messages are prescreened.