Hello, The fact that Yahoo's Geocities effort is closing down this year has been dicussed on many Lists. A few days ago a researcher on one of the Lists for England counties offered the following information. It seems to be good information, and I thought many people should know about it. If you know another researcher who might need it, or know of a List where it might be discussed, please let them know. See below. Betty (near Lowell, MA) FYI: Hi Betty, Geocities and all the addresses (URLs) are going to vanish at the end of 2009. Yes we are being offered hosting by Yahoo!, who own GeoCities, but with a different URL so no connection to anything like the Ancestry message boards, Google and all the other shipping websites, etc. that link to my Site for pictures, information about the captain of the ship, the voyages etc. The second point is these websites were created online using the GeoCities web creation tools so getting the data off is very painful. (It is the same as if you decided not to buy a family history program and that you would put your entire family history onto one of the free online sites that offer this service then, one day, the Site closed down and you lost the lot.) The third point is that many people will not know their Website of ten years or more is going to vanish which, is why it is important to get the message out to people. There are sites there created by a father who are now maintained by their children as a memorial to his work on the family tree. The children are not researching the family because dad did it. They only log in yearly, if that, to update the copyright notice or date to keep the site in Google. RootsWeb do not allow you to have pictures. I can move mine to my Optus account (which I have started doing slowly) but that isn't the point I am making here. Cheers, Irene. (Melbourne Australia) FYI: George Kidder in FL is working on getting his KIDDER web site moved to another place ! http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/1255/1255.htm And, I think there are researchers who have used Geocities for their "family photos."