Rootsweb southern African mailing lists still down

On 16 June 2014 there was a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on Ancestry.com, which hosts the Rootsweb mailing lists.

These mailing lists are still down after a week, and there's been no information about when they will be working again.

This has affected some of the lists dealing with parts of Africa, especially the southern African ones.

Until they are working again, people who are feeling cut off are welcome to post things in the general African genealogy list, which is not hosted by Rootsweb and so is still working. After all, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape are just as much part of Africa as Tunisia, Mauretania and Somalia.

African genealogy list

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afgen/

Group Email Addresses

Post message: afgen@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: afgen-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Unsubscribe: afgen-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

I've posted this to some of the people who I know have recently been active in the southern African Rootsweb lists.

When the Rootsweb lists are working again, of course you can go back to posting material of purely local interest in the specialist local lists, but I hope you will continue to post material of general African interest
in the African list.

Continental Civil Registration conference

This news item nearly slipped beneath my radar, and I haven't seen much discussion on it in genealogical circles, perhaps because we have our noses so deeply buried in the past that we don't notice the future creeping up on us, but this could have important implications for future genealogists. allAfrica.com: Africa: Experts At CRVs Conference in Critical Talks:

Experts meeting at the 2nd Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Conference are currently locked in critical discussions and debates on how to improve the field on the African continent.The experts are meeting in Durban until Wednesday and are expected to set the tone for the ministerial meeting and to a large extent, influence the shape of its outcomes, said Dimitri Sanga, Director at the African Centre for Statistics at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa."It is extremely crucial that in the next three days, experts discuss and debate all technical issues related to the improvement of civil registration in Africa... in order to help your ministers provide clear policy guidelines in the improvement of these systems," he told the delegates at the start of the conference on Monday.