Howdy cousins! I hope everyone's new year has gotten off to a good start. We have had quite a few new members join the list since we last did a roll call, so I thought I'd take a moment to explain to them what we've done in the past. We have found it helpful to have everyone post their Elam lineage so that we can all see who might be directly related to us and/or working on the same brick walls. There's no need to put together anything really elaborate. By way of example, the following is my line: Cassie A. Elam Thomas Jefferson Elam, Jr. Thomas Jefferson Elam, Sr. William Barrett Elam, Sr. Thomas Jefferson Elam William Barrett Elam Jesse Elam William Elam James Elam Gilbert Elam III Gilbert Elam, Jr. Gilbert Elam, Sr./Ann Robert Elam (through Ann) Thomas Elam You can include as much information and do it in any format that you like. Your participation certainly isn't mandatory, but it's a good way to make some contacts. It also helps me so that I know to whom I can refer people if they ask me a question to which I don't know the answer (I'm working toward omniscience, but haven't had a lot of time to devote to it lately). One quick note about my web page. I had been saving all of the Elam-Roots digests and making them accessible from an archive that I maintained. That has gotten to be too much work, so what I'm going to do is change the link to take you to the Rootsweb search engine. What you can do to search previous issues of Elam-Roots (or ANY other list sponsored by Rootsweb) is go to http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl where you will be prompted to enter the name of the mailing list you want to search. If you want to search this list, just type in Elam-Roots-L (don't type it in all caps). If you want to search other mailing list archives, you can access the main Rootsweb list by going to http://www.rootsweb.com/~maillist/ Once you've typed in the list name you want to search, you will be taken to another page where you can type in your query and tell it what year's archive you want it to search. It may sound confusing to as you're reading this, but it's really very easy once you actually sit down and do it. Good luck with your research! Cassie A. Elam celam@jw.com The Elam Family Research Page (www.geocities.com/heartland/prairie/6831/)