Hi Folks. First of all, thanks for all the efforts and contributions all of you have made during 1999. I may have gotton more out of the lists and home pages than many of you. However, I hope all of you got something out of participating on the list. Thanks for those who sent in suggestions on the County and Parish home pages. The work in not done. We can add additional information about the counties to improve the pages. I want to thank Virginia Crilley for her tremendous help with Jones Co., Ga. She has done well. I plan to up grade all of the pages using Virginia's suggestions. I believe that the lists are some help to those working on the Al County Heritage books. Keep up the good work. I retired in early January and will have more time to do the things that need to be done. Some of the Counties/Parishes are more active than others. Thats' OK. All have been helpfull. Most pages at least doubled in subscription and queries. Some activity has trippled in one year. Below are some statistics followed by some timely information about RootsWeb. Nice to know information: These are the counties my wife and I work with. Number on the Number on the Number of County List L list D list Queries Bullock, Al 105 33 157 Macon, Al 105 34 234 Pike, Al 287 92 766 Tallapoosa, Al 262 76 654 Jones, Ga 132 53 555 Iberia, La 86 31 181 St Martin, La 102 49 159 RADFORD 103 28 388 Robin (Louisiana Name) 8 4 0 Surnames on the surname pages are too many to count. After scanning the pages, I think some good things are going on. Now some need to know information. RootsWeb has been providing free space to host the mail list and Gen Forum list. They also host county and state home pages. It is free to all subscribers, however it is expensive to operate. The following is a short write up by Dr Brian Leverich about Roots web. WHY DOES ROOTSWEB NEED YOUR SUPPORT? by Dr. Brian Leverich <leverich@rootsweb.com> Sometimes it is difficult for users to understand the costs involved in operating RootsWeb and why it is worth genealogists' time and money to support RootsWeb. For example, take the United States census. RootsWeb is currently providing server support to the USGenWeb Archives and Census Projects as they bring the U.S. census online. Our goal is to have both a searchable index to the census *AND* images of all the pages available on an open basis for all Internet genealogists. Our best estimate is that bringing the census online will require about 3.6 terabytes of data storage. That means we will need about 200 18 GB hard disks, and each of those disks costs about $1,000. That means the data storage alone is going to cost $200,000, and that doesn't include the servers and the bandwidth to make that storage accessible over the Web. Is $200,000 a lot of money? Well, sort of. Regardless of how much they want to help, Karen and Brian couldn't pay for that even if they mortgaged their house and cashed in their pension savings. On the other hand, $200,000 is only about 67 cents per user at RootsWeb. That is about 1/100 of what some commercial firms are charging for data they have locked up in members-only areas. Bringing the U.S. census online is not the only project RootsWeb supports. We are hosting literally hundreds of other data projects, some American and many for other countries (like the British FreeBMD Project). If all (or even if most) of our users were contributors, there is a lot RootsWeb could be doing to accelerate the rate at which public records are brought online and opened to the public. You can help us bring those records online. For details about support levels/benefits and payment options, visit <http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html> or send e-mail to <RW-info@rootsweb.com>. The regular mail address is: RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative, P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798. (Please include your e-mail address on all correspondence and checks sent to RootsWeb.) "I AM ONE OF THE 7%" is a message we heard numerous times this week in response to Dr. Leverich's article about who supports RootsWeb. Your response has been encouraging, but growth is still painfully slow. Who are the 7% of users who support RootsWeb? To show our appreciation, RootsWeb has started a voluntary listing of current RootsWeb contributors at any level. To register: <http://www.rootsweb.com/~donors/addme.html>; to see the listing: <http://www.rootsweb.com/~donors/percent.html>. PS: If you decide to donate, please be certain to mention to Rootsweb, that you are a subscriber of the one of the above mail lists. May all of you have a happy and productive new year. John and Jan Radford johnjanr@intersurf.com Baton Rouge, La John and Jan Radford johnjanr@intersurf.com Baton Rouge, La