Just a couple of notes on yesterday's incident. - Don't let it bother you. As I said before, it happens in every mailing list, everywhere, at some time or another. The obscenities were totally uncalled for and I think he finally got that message. - This will happen again. Someone will join, become offended at something, go into a hairy conniption fit, and raise Cain. No one person can do anything to stop it on a public forum. But as a group, we can shut it down in short order. - Surprisingly enough, except for the few words that shouldn't be repeated, the members of this mailing list handled it the right way. You converse on a rational level, not an emotional level, and state the facts as you see them. This ended in less than a day. On many other lists, these kinds of threads can go on for days and even weeks. In this case, he unsubscribed himself without the intervention of the List Mom. That's the way it should end. The person recognizes that they don't belong, and they move on. Hopefully we all wish him well in his pursuit of BLANCHARD genealogy. - Several people became offended by parts of the thread. Sadly, that will happen. In a public forum, we will always have those that have little or no respect, especially for the younger readers and what they are being exposed to. Some tried to unsubscribe. My suggestion, when this happens again, take advantage of that "Delete" button with impunity. For those of you that still want to get off the list, try this: Send a message to the following address "BLANCHARD-L-request@rootsweb.com" with just one word in the message body being "unsubscribe". It's that simple. But we hope you don't. You may find that one piece that you are looking for some day. We wouldn't want you to miss it. - I haven't participated in the discussions of this list very much in the past, and I don't intend to until I see "that piece" again. But I have seen the Bruces on other lists which prompted my initial message. Sorry Harold, the part about excluding him from my message was just a ruse. As you may have noticed, he responded quite quickly with some of the offensive language. The purpose of that comment was to find out just how far he would go to continue his "harassment" line. It was also intended to accelerate the issue. If you let things like that go slow, they drag on for days. Bringing it to the forefront forces the issue and, in most cases, a quick resolution. This we saw. - Lastly, for those of you that want to know more about the mailing list server that we use, subscribing and unsubscribing, accessing the archives, and other things like who to complain to, drop in on the following web site URL, http://www.rootsweb.com/~maillist. There you can get just about anything you wanted to know regarding BLANCHARD-L and all of the other names being hosted. Good luck in your searches, lets move on. scud -- /-----------------------------------------------------------------\ | Mike Scudamore, SPARTA, Inc.| mailto:scud@huntsville.sparta.com | | 4901 Corporate Drive | Voice: (205)837-5282 Ext. 1504 | | Huntsville, AL 35805 | We may doze, but we never close! | \-----------------------------------------------------------------/