Hi Family, Yesterday I finished storing all the Christmas gifts. If you put a gift under the tree last month, please go to the Homestead <http://bowercommunity.com/homestead> or the Cottage's greatroom <http://bowercommunity.com/cottage> if your gift was a certificate. Jaime, your Bower-Keeler marriage certificate is also online at the Cottage. Our first Bowra certificate went online today at the Cottage! :) I'm working on an Ohio marriages file that was sent to me earlier this month. Hopefully, I'll be finished with it by early next week. (It's rather large, so no guarantees.) I still need the person who is researching James Kaufmann Bowers, son of James Bowers and Effie Gilbert, to please contact me. Cousins, if any of you submitted material to Bower Community and you still don't see it online, please let me know. With my 3 harddrive crashes back to back last month, I'm not sure I recovered everything. I have a few files that I can't identify now (file names are now something like 00001.sav) and if your data isn't displayed, these could be one of yours. Next step, revamp that poor cottage <g> ~ well, just a little anyway. I'm also thinking (just thinking, mind you) of revamping the Homestead a little, too. Does anyone have any ideas they'd like to contribute? If so, please contact me offline <ladyaudris@earthlink.net>. The Homestead fell short of our normal 20,000+ hits last year. I don't plan to have that happen again and suspect it's because our home is beginning to look a little uhm... tired? stale? We also need to add more data to keep our visitors coming back. If you have material you'd like to display, again please contact me offline. And, while I'm thinking of it ~ I've seen some sites that are linked to us still using our 2-year web addy at GeoCities! Please, cousins, if you come across a site like that, let the webmaster there know our current address and ask him to make a change. If you don't feel comfortable making that request, please let me know about the incorrect URL and the URL of the website it's on. One more thing ~ no ancestors have visited the parlor since before Christmas! Do we not have any pre-1790 ancestors that someone wants to spotlight??? If you do, please contact me. There are no restrictions to have an ancestor spotlighted in the parlor except s/he must have been alive before 1790, and no living persons show in his/her descendancy to be put online. Otherwise, pictures, certificates, anything can accompany your ancestor's bio/genealogy, whatever. Okay, I think that about covers it. Next month, after I've revamped the Cottage, we'll have a GEDCOM update. I wish you all a THRILLING Thursday! E.R. is on tonite!! yeaaayyy! :) Colleen