Jim raised a serious question. If we look back 10 generations, we each have a thousand or so ancestors, all of them equally worthy of our genealogical research (though some of them may be unknown to us!). Even taking pedigree collapse into account, we still "should" each be monitoring hundreds of surname discussion groups. Obviously, there isn't enough time to do that, so we must decide how to cut down to a reasonable load. I used to draw the line at two surname groups, but it is very hard to resist new ones, so I have given some thought to ways of getting the benefits of these groups without spending all the time it would take to subscribe. The best I have come up with is to take advantage of the Rootsweb search engine to track down only those few articles that mention the combination of forenames I want. Admittedly, using this technique might result in missing a clue here and there, but that could happen anyway. John Chandler