A few on this list know me, but most of you do not. Following my post of yesterday, I have exchanged personal e-mails with perhaps a half dozen or so of you over the last 24 hours, so some of you have read what I am about to say before. For the sake of the rest, I thought it might be useful to at least put my position into perspective relative to the CCC and what Gordon and others are trying to accomplish. First of all, I am an American, and not a "real Canadian" as most of you are. I am a retired U. S. Marine and now working as a civilian in our Department of Defense. That being said, allow me to also say that my father was born in Canada (Dawson, YT), and from his grandfather back through my Cann line, nearly everyone was Canadian, and English before that. For this and other reasons, I have always considered Canada "my second homeland," despite the fact that I have never had the opportunity to visit you folks up there. For largely this reason, I have remained "in the background" in your fight, because I do not think an American should be in the business of saying what others should or should not do with their own government. In my opinion, too many Americans do that around the world, and that is a major reason why many people dislike us. I do not have any wish to be "The Ugly American" of literature fame, so I have stayed in the background and followed the CCC activities from there. . . . . . until a statement was made about me on the list yesterday that I felt I had to comment on. Gordon and I have since (I hope) resolved that issue privately, and it is over. Though I have not been a subscriber to this list for very long, I have always been interested in the CCC and their goals, and I truly hope Gordon succeeds in what he is trying to do here. We are going through much the same thing down here in the U. S., except that in our case it is not so much a federal issue, but a state one, so we have to fight it one state at a time. Each time it ends in one state, it crops up again in another. Obviously, with the Census it is a federal issue, and the law there makes the census information available after 72 years (1930 has just been made public), so that is fairly reasonable. However, various state birth, death, and other such data is now being removed from public accessibility all over the country. This is rather long, and I apologize for that, but I did want to put things into perspective. As a List Administrator of six RootsWeb lists in Nova Scotia (and subscriber to numerous others), I have always tried to keep ads and other off-topic posts off of the lists, including repeated posts about the CCC and their efforts, despite the fact that I support the cause from the background. If I allow one group to do it, then I must allow another, and another, so I simply keep them all off unless clearly topical to my list. When I recently became aware of this list, I subscribed to it twice (in list and digest mode as well) because I do want to follow along if I can. I will not be a frequent contributor for reasons mentioned above, but I will be "lurking in the background" to keep abreast of things. My apologies to Gordon and all of you for the length of this, I have always talked too much :~), but I did want to put things into perspective before any further friction develops. If any of you feel the need to respond, please feel free to do so privately, unless you feel it is topical and would be of interest to the group. I cannot guarantee everyone a reply, but I do try to respond to any mail I get. Best wishes to all from a Canadian at heart in northern Virginia. David E. Cann [email protected]