For those of you who don't receive the weekly letter from Rootsweb, here's the latest report on how much traffic they're handling. If you don't already support this great organization, won't you consider making a donation? You can become a contributer for $12 or $24 will get you sponsor status and where else can we get so much for so little? Mailing lists such as this one, GenConnect boards, GenWeb sites, Archives, the Library, and all the other neat things that the organization provides enable us to connect to our ancestors. I know that personally, it's the best $24 I've ever spent on genealogy. (- climbing down from soapbox ;-> ) Jane NEWS AND NOTES FROM ROOTSWEB 163,035,217 EMAIL MESSAGES AND A LOT MORE. In March, RootsWeb supported the following for the Internet genealogical community: o 4,030 independently authored Web sites. o 108,887,834 total Web hits: 28,801,459 were HTML pages. 17,209,828 were cgi-bin database searches and such. 62,815,960 were graphics (GIFs, JPEGs, etc.). o 2,154,058 file downloads from the USGenWeb Archives and the ROOTS-L Library. o 6,100 independently operated RootsWeb-hosted mailing lists. o 163,035,217 pieces of e-mail shipped to our mailing lists. That's about a 14% increase in traffic just since January. What folks may not realize is just what those numbers mean. It takes a huge amount of bandwidth to transfer all these Web pages and e-mail messages to the Internet, and RootsWeb's monthly Internet costs have grown from about $10,000 to about $12,000 in just the last two months. It also takes about 30 servers (very large computers) to handle all these Web pages and mailing lists, and RootsWeb is having to spend $10,000 or more each month adding new servers and upgrading its older servers to keep up with demand. No government agency or big corporation pays for RootsWeb: we're entirely supported by contributions made by users like you. If you like the support RootsWeb is providing for the genealogical community and if you want help RootsWeb provide even better support for the community, please consider supporting us and becoming a RootsWeb Contributor: <http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html> or send e-mail to: <RW-info@rootsweb.com> RootsWeb's address is: RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative, P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798. (Please include your e-mail address on all correspondence and checks.)