Dear Listers...as you all know, Rootsweb is what supports all these lists........you may want to read the following: Hello, In the exceprt below, Rootsweb is responding to questions about commercial partnerships, while retaining non-profit status. I think it is very important that more users contribute. I urge everyone to read this excerpt and contribute what they can. If 93 per cent of the people who use the resources are not contributors, we are depending on a small group of people to maintain the genealogical community spirit and that is pretty unrealistic. In fact, if you save one trip to an archive, I suspect that that is worth a contribution. If you have found resources through a rootsweb mail list that may also be well worth a contribution. And then there are all those great resources for your next puzzle and magical mystery tour ... The people who have created rootsweb are pretty phenomenal in their commitment and excel in skills that make rootsweb one of the best managed sites on the internet. While rootsweb is very near the top of the high traffic sites, it is one of the most reliable. Think about what you can do and it will not only be greatly appreciated, but give a resounding cheer for the vision and perserverance of the rootsweb staff. Thanks for any help you can offer, Sharon "When we launched RootsWeb, we assumed that our users would prefer to support us as much as they were able, in exchange for a site open to all, without banners plastered all over everything and without having resources locked up (as is done at other genealogy sites), available only for fees on the order of $60 per year. Instead, people can support RootsWeb for as little as $12 per year. We thus hoped that a reasonable fraction of our users, perhaps half of them, would support us in some way. And because we expected support from the community, we made promises to projects like USGenWeb that we would freely host them for the good of the Internet genealogy community. We have no intention of reneging on those early promises, but it has been difficult, because the community support we anticipated has not been there. Although people use the site like crazy, fewer than 7% of our users have chipped in to keep things going. The other 93%? Perhaps they're busy, or they're broke, or they won't pay unless they have to, or they don't think RootsWeb is useful. Who knows? But it means that RootsWeb has run at a cash flow loss. In simple terms, Karen Isaacson and Brian Leverich have donated not only their time as system administrators but a substantial part of their personal resources to provide the genealogical community with RootsWeb. The rest of RootsWeb's staff have also made substantial contributions. Because RootsWeb's costs exceed its income, we can't provide all the genealogical facilities we'd like to support. These could include online searchable databases of pension records, census indexes, vital records, or countless other valuable genealogical services that we could easily provide -- if only we could afford the staff to support them. And, ultimately, RootsWeb can't even continue to exist if we don't bring our costs and revenues into balance, something we want to have under control before the transition to non-profit status (as opposed to losing money status) is completed. We are doing what we can to remedy the situation. For instance, we are selling banner advertisements where we can. However, this alone will never provide enough revenue to cover the costs of the unbannered volunteer projects which consume most of RootsWeb's resources yet by their very nature produce no direct revenue, even as they provide invaluable content to the genealogical community. The new communities, from their inception, will be fully supported by advertising. They will be paying their own way. We can shift some of the costs of maintaining the Web, mailing list, GenConnect, and search engine servers onto the new communities, so that the new communities will subsidize a genealogical community that hasn't been supporting itself. Although we have been disappointed in the amount of financial support of the genealogical community, we would like to express our deep gratitude to the writer of the letter above and the other 7% of our users who have helped make RootsWeb available to the whole community. Without their support and encouragement, there would be no RootsWeb. If you would like to join the folks who are making RootsWeb possible and thus help us bring new genealogical data online, freely available to all, please visit: <http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html> or send e-mail to: RW-info@rootsweb.com * * * ____________________________________________________________________