Welcome to the Morton Family who have joined this week. If you haven't already contributed, we hope to hear from you soon. ****** ****** ****** You will all no doubt have seen the copy of my Query Board post earlier this week. I can only say that the "offending" posts were made when I was on holiday in 1998, and I was not sufficiently thorough in checking the new posts when I got back from that holiday. The message which alerted me to the problem follows ... "I was wandering round the Buteshire message board looking at all the messages. I was a bit taken aback to find a list of MIs for Buteshire sent in by a ****** ***** a couple of years ago and obviously copied from the book of MIs published by the Scottish Genealogy Society. Now I can understand the temptation to make this information freely available BUT, apart from the question of copyright, it is a very shortsighted attitude. If the information is available without having to buy the book where is the incentive for anyone else to publish other books of MIs? Avoiding paying means that we run the risk, in the long term, of MIs being unrecorded and eventually being unrecordable. Isn't it worth paying a few pounds to encourage the gathering of MIs for future generations? " Sentiments with which I agree. The publication details again : "Pre-1855 Gravestone Inscriptions in BUTE and ARRAN" An Index. Edited by Alison Mitchell for the Scottish Genealogy Society. 1987 ISBN 0 901061 31 X The copyright position here is quite clear - while the Inscriptions on the Gravestones cannot be copyrighted as they are quite literally in the public domain, a published index of them can. What I will say is that in my inspection of the postings prior to removal, I found they appeared to use exactly the same abbreviations and had hyphens in exactly the same places as the above publication. While I accept the poster's statement that the lists were taken from a US publication from the early 1960's, any copyright issue is between that publisher and the SGS. Furthermore, even if it was a 1960's publication, it is still not old enough to permit verbatim copying. In conclusion, a search I made on the web (both for new and second-hand copies) came up with just one book, the one I have detailed above. For new or second hand books, for me the obvious starting place is ... http://www.staffs.ac.uk/services/library_and_info/bookshop.html This gives a current list of on line book shops - just by going to the first (Blackwells) I came up with a hit using the ISBN (leave out the spaces) - delivery 2 to 6 weeks. ****** ****** ****** Feel free to join in and present your own items. Peter Cook [email protected] List maintainer and Co-host with Barbara < [email protected] > of the ButeshireGenWeb mailing list.