Hello people: I have just been visiting Lisa Franklin's excellent site, "Tracking Your Alabama Roots", at http://members.aol.com/GenWeb/Lisa/tyralachart.htm Like many of you, I have links to her county query pages, and I just discovered that ALL of her query site is down with the exception of archived 1996 and 1997 queries which are downloadable .zip files. Lisa's main page says that she is busy archiving the 1998 queries and will reopen her query forms as soon as she can. In the meantime, it appears that some of the counties are relying SOLELY on Lisa's query pages to fulfill the USGenWeb requirement to provide access to queries. This situation with Lisa's site unable to accept queries exposes the risk associated with relying on an individual web master to provide the query support for our counties. Therefore, it is imperative that County Coordinators set up a query system that you control. You may use any of the available bulletin board/guest book systems such as GuestWorld <http://www.GuestWorld.com> and Piett's Guestbook <http://www.piett.com/pgb/index.html>. You are also welcome to use any forms which your web site provider supports. GeoCities has a forms utility, as do many of the private ISPs. For those of you with County pages on RootsWeb, the forms routine is called MailMerge. GenConnect <http://cgi.rootsweb.com/~genbbs/> and Query Express <http://cgi.rootsweb.com/qexpress/> are two systems set up specifically for USGenWeb County Coordinators. There are other options such as manually collecting and posting the queries from an e-mail link on your county page. If you would like a system to organize the queries, take a look at CCHelper <http://www.rootsweb.com/~cchelper>. For more information and some examples, the TXGenWeb folks have a nice page at http://www.rootsweb.com/~txgenweb/queryop.html This is a very important change which needs to be made to some, though not all of the county pages. Please make every attempt to have this in place by 1 March. If you cannot meet this deadline, feel free to contact me about this. Regards, Leigh