Your notes of appreciation and love to Lea & I continue to come in, deluging our in-boxes. Thank you all so much for having allowed us to even begin the journey to try to do adequate justice to this 4 county region. Being County Coordinators has been such a totally awesome and terrific experience, allowing us the priviledge to correspond with you, perhaps even help you somewhat?? And the miracle of meeting some of you the first time, as though old friends. And, we can pretty well guarantee that the more digging we did, scurrying to answer your questions, provided us a more knowledgeable background also. There are no words to express our gratitude for what you gave us in return. It quickly became apparent to me that while I was from out of state and had not had direct access to the Georgia records, most of you were either from Ga or had at least visited there to do research. Me? I've just been hurrying to"catch up" to all of you who were miles ahead of me in experiencing the area and our mutual history. Our idea was rather simple,,,to build a backdrop of information for the visiting researchers,,, to paint a picture of how life was there in those early years, so you (and we ) could perhaps catch a glimmer into the soul of those who pioneered the region, then more fully see the whole picture. Truth is, in spite of the picture of Talbot, Chattahoochee. Muscogee, Marion or County we had managed to get onto those pages, we really have only just begun our delightful journey. Lea & I were quite willing to search for sources, bear the expense of, take the time to pore over microfilm, line by line, frame by frame, page by page. then enter into the computer, then html encode and upload to rootsweb. Not a problem, happy to do, pleased to do, because you who were so honestly and earnestly researching. As far as we were concerned, hey! we were in this together, helping, sharing, together. And, altogether, as interested parties, it made far more sense for one or two to do the grunt work, than for all to mill around, redoubling efforts, getting not much accomplished as a WHOLE. In return, you shared your brick walls, your high notes of discovery, and contributed information that neither we or any other one person could have ever discovered on their own, even after spending a lifetime exploring. There are no words to express our appreciation of you and your enormous efforts and accomplishments singly. We entered the online frontier with Rootsweb with the understanding that Rootsweb would do their best to protect our copyright of material, and would never sell that material. Then, on June 21, Rootsweb announced their sale to Ancestry.com , otherwise known as MyFamily.com. You're probably familiar with them, they too supply online information, for a price. All of a sudden we were faced with a tough decision. Believe me, it is quite one thing to volunteer to supply free information to those whom you believe are at one with your quite personal "need to know" intent, and quite another to think there is the slightest possibility that the information you've worked to supply will be SOLD by someone else. We have since found 3 other websites on Rootsweb that had "adopted" either our maps or documents we sought to freely share with you as fellow researchers, interested in the well-being of the area. They did so without either our permission or knowledge, without even a acknowledgement and despite our copyrights. There are probably at least that many more sites that we know nothing about as yet. After working for years on the research, I put part of my own Hammock-McCrary-McBryde family lineage on the page. Now I see it all over Rootsweb. The only problem with that is, the people who "lifted" it, didn't do their research, and have since added to and so mucked it up, as to render it misleading and absolutely ridiculous, at best. BUT, they've given me credit for their assinine renderings. Guaranteed to set research back a few years! You may well think Lea and I are being small, or picky, or are making a big to-do about nothing in removing our collection of records from the internet. After all, a goodly portion of what we offered on the pages was of public record and could be found on your own, if you but had the time, the interest, could afford the effort or could locate. Could be you're right in that assumption, and we were but naive to think it would be otherwise. Carol Johnson