Live Roots - A New Genealogy Search

Illya D'Addezio of Genealogy Today and Family Tree Connection wrote to tell me about the launch of yet another Web site today -- a metasearch genealogy site called Live Roots. The initial version of the site was released Friday, described by Illya as "a new website designed to help researchers locate genealogical data -- both online and offline, and either digitized or in-print. I'm partnering with major genealogy companies and many medium and smaller publishers to combine their respective catalogs into one repository."

The site looks promising, but obviously still has a ways to go. Searches for many of the more uncommon surnames I've been researching lately turned up absolutely nothing. The majority of the results for more common surnames appear to be coming from published family histories on subscription sites World Vital Records and Ancestry.com, as well as Illya's own genealogy subscription site, Family Tree Connection. Results from the Live Roots Web site will also point users to names found in published, off-line resources, such as the published books currently included in the database from Higginson Book Company. According to Illya, there are additional features, more catalogs and links in the pipeline to be added in coming weeks, months and years. The goal is for Live Roots to become a site where genealogists can keep up with what's new from a variety of publishers of genealogical data, as well as to help determine when a particular genealogical resource in which you're interested might be available for free or from a service to which you already subscribe.