About this preservation project

What this site is

From about 2001 to 2016, ldsroots.com served a network of genealogy doorway pages co-branded with OneGreatFamily.com. Millions of those pages were cited across the genealogy web; then the pages went away, leaving the citations pointing at nothing. This project resurrects the addresses: every URL the domain served resolves to a new page carrying whatever facts the public record preserved, with a link to the original capture.

Each page states its evidence tier plainly — from a fully verified record down to an address that was never captured at all — so a citation resolves honestly even when nothing survives behind it.

What this site is not

This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "LDS" in the domain name is a fact of the domain's history, not a claim of affiliation. It is also not affiliated with OneGreatFamily.com, which still operates independently.

Copyright

Facts are not copyrightable (Feist v. Rural, 1991), and standard date notation is not protectable expression. No OneGreatFamily text, design, layout, or imagery is reproduced here; every page is new expression written around recovered facts, with provenance credited to the Internet Archive. The period look of this site is original work in the idiom of its era, built from scratch.

Living persons

Where a person may still be living, vital details are withheld — on their own page and wherever they appear as a parent. Names still render because they were already in the cited URLs.

Era timeline

Before Oct 2001: Prehistory. An earlier ldsroots.com predates the co-brand; the earliest archived capture of the domain dates from October 2001.
Oct 2001 – 2006: The fact window. Co-branded doorway pages on ldsroots.com, ldsliving.ldsroots.com and meridian.ldsroots.com carry a name, an OGFN, birth and death facts and parent links drawn from OneGreatFamily's database. Everything recoverable here comes from captures in this span.
2002 – 2005: The live co-branded site at its fullest: surname indexes, dash-format name pages, a subscriber gate in front of the full records, editorial pages.
2006 – 2016: The funnel years. The homepage redirects to OneGreatFamily; doorway pages keep being served but no longer carry facts.
c. 2017 – 2023: The squatter years. The domain lapses and a spam shop squats on it. Those addresses answer 410 Gone here: they were never part of the archive.
2024 – Aug 2026: Parked.
Aug 2026: Registered by Fourteen Web Media.
Sep 2026: Restored as a citation resolver and preservation archive — this site.

Evidence tiers

T1: A capture from inside the fact window exists. Enrichable with vitals and parent edges; enriched once those facts have been extracted and hand-verified against the capture.
T2: The page was captured, but only outside the fact window, when it no longer carried facts. Address evidence and the best capture link.
T3: Known only from a subscriber-gate address that named the OGFN; the page itself was never captured.
T4: A name record: a dash-format page that carried a name but no OGFN.
T5: Citation-evidenced: attested only by an external citation of an ldsroots.com address. Well-formed addresses that were never archived render this way on the fly, and each visit is counted as a signal of what people still look for.

Who runs this

ldsroots.com is a preservation project by Fourteen Web Media, led by Kurt Henninger, whose own family research kept hitting dead ldsroots.com citations — including one at the very top of his pedigree. It is also a working prototype of what a careful website restoration can look like: period face, modern engineering.

Analytics & cookies

Traffic is measured two ways: Vercel Web Analytics, which is served from this domain and sets no cookie, and Google Tag Manager (container GTM-TMWP7FWT), which loads from Google and may set cookies for measurement. Neither is used to identify individual visitors, nothing is sold or shared for advertising, and no personal details are collected on this site beyond what a browser sends with any request. The only first-party cookie is the private review key used by the maintainer.

Corrections & removals

Corrections are welcome and removals are honoured, no questions asked. See Corrections & removals.

Data release

Identities: 44,231 OGFN identities T1 41,115 · T2 426 · T3 2,665 · T5 citation-evidenced 25 · 1,275 presumed living
Name records: 2,760
Archived addresses: 219,123 unique URLs
Fact window: Oct 2001 – Dec 2006
Release: code/ldsroots/export_site_data.py v2.0.0 brain commit 5a503011 · generated 2026-09-03 18:30:33 UTC