Lately, I have been asked, by several subscribers to the Mailing Lists which I manage, how to access past messages that have been posted on the various Lists. I am sending these instructions to all the Lists I manage. At the end of the instructions, you will find the URL's at Rootsweb for logging on to the various List Archives. **********(Instructions for Viewing Archives of Mailing Lists)********** You can go to Rootsweb and see all the previous messages for any Mailing List that the Listowner has set up for Archiving. (NOTE: If the Listowner has NOT taken the necessary steps to Archive the Lists, then you will NOT be able to retrieve past messages. I HAVE Archived all the Lists which I manage.) (Instructions: If you have never accessed the Archives before, you will have to click on the button to establish a Username and Password. Go through this process. (NOTE: The Username and Password you establish will be good for ALL Archives, regardless of the name of the Mailing List. You will have ONE Username and ONE Password at Rootsweb for searching ALL of the Archives). Once you have done this, you will be taken to a page that has an Index of all months for which the List has been archived. As an example, you might click on September, 1999. Then, another page will load. Unless you are searching for specific text in emails, click on the "Chronological Index". (More about searching for specific text below.) This will take you to a page, where all the emails for the chosen month are listed, with the most recent at the top. From there, you can start clicking on individual emails to read them. The "names" of the emails are just the subject lines. Following each subject, you will find (x). This tells you if there has been a followup to that subject. (0) indicates that there have been no replies. (2) indicates that there are 2 followups to that message. When you click on each individual email, at the very bottom, there are links to the followups, or replies, if any exist. You can read the followups by clicking on them.) Here are the URL's for the Lists I manage: (Please note the "case". The "LISTNAME-L" MUST be in CAPS.) http://archiver.rootsweb.com/BARREL-RACING-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/BRILES-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/BRILL-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/BROYLES-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/CFT-WIN-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/CULLOP-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/DEARMAN-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/DORMAN-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/DURMAN-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/GAROUTTE-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/LOVETT-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/LOVETTE-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/WILHITE-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/WILHOIT-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/WILKINSON-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/SURNAME-QUERY-L/ http://archiver.rootsweb.com/GERMANNA_COLONIES-L/ NOTE on searching for specific text in the Archives: (Using the URL's above, you can NOT search for messages containing ONLY, for example, "Reuben Wilhite". If you type in "Reuben Wilhite", you will get a list of all emails containing BOTH of those words, but NOT the phrase "Reuben Wilhite". (The quotation marks above, of course, are not to be typed in.) If you want to search the Archives to do SPECIFIC "Boolean" searches, you will have to access the "Mailing Lists -Interactive Search" at the URL below. In other words, if you want to search out emails that contain SPECIFICALLY the name "Reuben Wilhite", you will have to use this URL: http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl This will open a page, where you type in the name of the List you wish to search. Here are the names you would type in to search the Lists I manage: BARREL-RACING BRILES BRILL BROYLES CFT-WIN CULLOP DEARMAN DORMAN DURMAN GAROUTTE LOVETT LOVETTE WILHITE WILHOIT WILKINSON SURNAME-QUERY GERMANNA_COLONIES Notice that in this search, you do not type in "-L". Let's use the WILHITE-L Mailing List again as an example: Once you have typed in (or pasted in) the URL immediately above, you would type in WILHITE in the "Name of List" box. Then, you go to a page where you type in your search query. (Another Note: You can choose the year in which you wish to search.) If you type in "Reuben Wilhite", you will get a list of emails that contain that exact phrase, "Reuben Wilhite". (The quotation marks are, of course, NOT typed in.) You can search for "Conrad Reuben Wilhite" and get a list of emails that contain that EXACT name. Another example: Let's search the List, GERMANNA_COLONIES. After following the instructions above, you type in "madison and spotswood and germanna". You find 12 messages that contain ALL of these three words. Another: Type in "spotswood and golden and horseshoe". You get a return of 7 messages in which all those 3 words appear. Type in "golden horseshoe" and you get 11 "hits" in which the exact phrase "golden horseshoe" appears, either in the subject line, or in the body text. Try "germanna and epidemic and child". You get two "hits". Type in "rapidan river" and you get 30 "hits". 30 emails containing the EXACT phrase "raidan river". If I have confused everyone (probably), let me know and I will try to explain all this convoluted and confusing process. I'm sorry that Rootsweb hasn't made it easier to access the archives and do specific text searches. That's just the way it is. In any case, you now have the URL's to start your search, or to access the Archives of past email messages to the various Lists. Regards, SgtGeorge George W. Durman Knoxville, TN