Hi all! I've been pretty absent from the list and website lately. Sorry for that, just been very busy. I wanted to let everyone know about a new feature that will be coming within a week to the website and also take a vote on another feature. 1st, I have decided to add a message board to the site (the site is in my signature). I've thought about doing this for years, but put it off because there is a plethora of message boards for genealogists out there. I finally decided to add them as just another tool for everyone to use and I really don't expect a lot of use on these boards. I am in no way advocating using my boards over Ancestry.com/Rootsweb.com boards, these are just another tool you can use. Anyone can view the boar, but to help control spam and unwanted posts to the board, I have set it up so that you have to register to post a message and you have to register to see the poster's contact info (user name, email, etc.). If I find that these security measures are not enough, I can upgrade them and make the restrictions tighter. Also, when you register, a message will be send to the email address you give in order to confirm your address before you can post. I know to some this will be seen as an inconvenience, but it's all to protect your email from spammers who search for email addresses on message boards. There are still some kinks I need to work out and hopefully will get that done within the week. Check the main website under the announcements in about a week for the new boards. 2nd, I have the option to add a chat room to the website. Is this something that you would like? I know there are also a plethora of chat sites online as well (I'm a host at one). If a chat room is added, I'd like to keep the chats related to the surnames on the website/lists I moderate. There is a good chat forum for locality chats (http://www.genealogyforum.org), I host Southern US on Monday nights, but there are chats for pretty much any location and general chats for locations that don't have a specific chat. Ideas of how a chat room on the GenDepository site could be utilized is everyone of a surname get together to share information (this could be good for the "lurkers" on these lists who never post), or possibly a meeting place for a special research topic on one of the surnames to give each other updates, etc. 2 special topics I can think of right now are the NC Bradford project I'm working on and also the Bradford DNA project. For the Eller list, maybe all the descendants of George Michael Eller. Maybe for the Black list all Blacks in a certain location or from a common ancestor. I would be more than happy to set up this chat room if it will be used. The chat room itself is free for me to set up, but if I do set it up and it's never used, it would be a waste of disk space and bandwidth. Please respond to me off the list if you are interested in this feature. Please don't clog up the mailing list by responding there, send you vote off the list. If you are on list mode (Surname-L), you should just be able to hit reply and respond to me directly. If you ware digest mode (Surname-D), copy my email address, hit reply, and paste my address over the one in the "to" field. Thanks all and good luck to all in your research! Erin Bradford eabradfo@yahoo.com List manager http://www.ncalhn.org ALHN County Coordinator for multiple NC Counties http://www.gendepository.com (the Genealogy Depository-Barringer, Black, Bradford, Coventry, Eller, Hackett, Hupp, and Kern)