Twila, Rootsweb has a web page of guidelines for listowners and potential listowners. I haven't looked at it, but judging from the votes of confidence you've been receiving here, maybe you should. It's at http://www.rootsweb.com/~maillist/#listowning If any of you are still a little unsure of what Rootsweb really is, below is a brief synopsis from their weekly newsletter "Rootsweb Review". You can subscribe to the Review, as noted below. I've just noticed for the first time that in their instructions for subscribing to any mail list, it says to put "subscribe" (or "unsubscribe") in BOTH the subject line and the body of the message. This is a departure from the norm for mailing lists, and I wonder if this small detail is what is causing some folks problems with subscribing. +++++++++++++++ VIRTUAL DREAMS: WHAT IS ROOTSWEB? RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative (RootsWeb) is the oldest and largest genealogy resource on the Internet. Today it houses more than 2,650 genealogy Websites, including the USGenWeb Archives; ROOTS-L (in its 11th year) and more than 3,600 other mailing lists; and the Roots Surname List (in its 10th year). The June 1998 Roots Surname List contains 420,971 names from about 58,000 submitters. RootsWeb has two missions: (1) to make large volumes of data available to the online genealogical community at minimal cost; and (2) to provide support services to online genealogical activities such as Usenet newsgroup moderation, mailing list maintenance, and surname list generation. While all of RootsWeb's databases, mailing lists, and other activities are open to everyone, selected services (such as automatic notification when your surname appears in new material uploaded to RootsWeb) are available only to members and sponsors. Some services that are expensive to provide (such as personal Web space or Web serving of personal GEDCOM files) are available at a nominal cost to sponsors. The "cooperative" in RootsWeb's name means that we are a community-supported facility and your choice about joining has a direct impact on how fast RootsWeb can bring more resources online for the Internet genealogical community. By becoming a member, sponsor, donor, or patron, your support of RootsWeb helps to provide Web and FTP space to thousands of genealogical activities, mailing lists for thousands of groups of genealogists with shared interests, and search engines to make more than four billion bytes of genealogical data (the equivalent of two million printed pages) freely available to Internet genealogists. If you would like to help RootsWeb by becoming a member, sponsor, donor, or patron, please visit: <http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html> MAILING LISTS AND WEB SITES: To subscribe or unsubscribe from any RootsWeb mailing list, send an e-mail message with only the word SUBSCRIBE (or UNSUBSCRIBE) in the subject and the body of the message to [name of list]-L-request@rootsweb.com (for mail mode) or to [name of list]-D-request@rootsweb.com (for digest mode). If you have an automatic signature file, please be sure to turn it off before you send the request. For example, if you wish to be removed from this mailing list, send your UNSUBSCRIBE message to: Rootsweb-Review-L-request@rootsweb.com +++++++++++++++ Once again, I guess I should say that I am in no way affiliated with RootsWeb, and if y'all feel that we should go to some other list server, put it up for a vote. But since we are already established with RootsWeb, merely changing the listowner should entail nothing more than a couple of e-mails to Rootsweb, and if we change servers, we will all have to unsub from the old list and re-sub to the new one, like we had to do during the Maiser disaster. Personally, I'd rather not go through that again. I have written a note to Jen, asking if she would like to be relieved of listowner duties... oh, right, y'all saw that note, didn't you? :} I've not heard a response from her. Twila, why don't you take a look at the listowner guidelines mentioned above and see if you want to take on the job? Then give us a bump and tell us what you think. Of course anyone else interested in the job is encouraged to do so as well. Regards, y'all... Tom Tom Robison Ossian, Indiana tcrobi@adamswells.com Never forget the importance of history. To know nothing of what happened before you took your place on earth, is to remain a child forever. [unknown]