Rebecca, Thank you! I couldn't have said it any better myself. For those wondering "Are stories about Drew County & my Drew County ancestors OK?", the answer is...absolutely! I love reading the stories about everyone. This is the kind of stuff you won't find anywhere else, and it makes our family history "come alive". Now, I want y'all to know that I'm not trying to be a "big, bad meanie" by striving to keep the jokes, poems, private e-mail, etc., off the list. Let me try to explain why sticking to the topic(s) of the list is so important. Pretend for a minute that you are the Rootsweb computer system. You are subscribed to around 4,000 mailing lists at this point, so you get hundreds of thousands of e-mails every day. Now pretend that you can't delete a single one of those e-mails from your hard drive, even the ones that don't interest you personally, because you are being generous and hosting archives for other Internet genealogists to search. You can see how quickly your hard drive is going to fill up with all those messages. Now pretend that you can only go buy a bigger hard drive every few months, because your computer equipment budget is sporadic. You rely on donations from some of the researchers who use your archives, but sometimes the donations don't come in on time, or they're not enough to cover the cost of a new hard drive. Pretty soon, you will be nervously eye-balling your hard drive, thinking about how much hard drive space you have left. Now imagine what happens when one of those funnies comes out: "Top 10 Signs You're Addicted to Genealogy". This e-mail starts getting posted to more and more lists, let's say half of all the Rootsweb lists. Eventually, you end up with about 2,000 copies of the exact same e-mail on your hard drive (and remember, you can't delete them). If each of those e-mails is 1 kilobyte in size (a pretty small message), you now have 2 Megabytes just for that "Top 10" message. Think how much genealogy data could have been posted to Rootsweb's web servers if only we had that 2 Megabytes of disk space free. Rootsweb would like to bring more and more searchable databases online. But as you can see, they are using all of their resources just maintaining the status quo. If we can help them by cutting down on the off-topic, extraneous posts (and yes, I do consider my reminders to be in this category--wish I didn't have to send them!!), we can help Rootsweb bring more helpful data online. And with that, I'm going to start making my list of things to research at the Drew Co. archives & courthouse in a couple of weeks! Y'all have a good week & I will post when I can, --Melissa P.S. Where are all your "most wanted" ancestors? Surely someone else is stuck on a Drew County line... rdea (rdea@seark.net) wrote: >Here are my suggestions for posting: >1. any genealogy relating to Drew County >2. any family history relating to Drew County > Family history is the STORIES that go with those lines. > Plus these family history stories are "local history." > Gives one a sense of the period. >3. any genealogy tips, ie, websites, new places to search, etc. > this is info of a general nature that can help all. >4. any reference material such as maps, books, etc. >5. history of the county in general. >Here are my suggestions for not posting: >1. jokes: whether genealogy or not >2. little smaltzy stories that have nothing to do with Drew history >3. private mail between two Ardrew subscribers