I served for one meeting of the board. It was obvious I could accomplish more outside the board than on the board, so I left. A bill was paid by AHSGR for translation services - Rick Rye was going to accompany me, but health issues prevented his travel. This was five years ago. I was out the cost of his airline ticket, which was not a problem. It was necessary to employ a translator, however, in the attempt to find conscription records related to Germans from the Volga, since I can not read handwritten Russian. Talk about a Faustian bargain! No records were found, and I moved on to other projects after my departure from the board: translation of VG histories of Protestant villages, research in *Mittheilungen und Nachrichten, *translation of Pastor Frederich Dsirne's history of the Volga-German colonies in Russia, etc. Those items have nothing to do with LDS. BTW, the 1850 and 1857 census data which I did find in Salt Lake City was given by me to Brent Mai. I understand he has translated some of these census records (I am told some census records he gets are directly from Russian archives), and those village census records are available for purchase in the AHSGR bookstore. That is fine with me. Let's see, I paid for my trip from Los Angeles, where I lived at the time, to Salt Lake City, my hotel room and meals in Salt Lake City and gave away the fruits of my discovery. And AHSGR makes some money. Fine with me, because it benefits a large number of researchers. And I do not hold copyright on any of that material. As I said, the annotated Kontora cases are available online. Only the titles and an internal numbering system seem to have survived. I am not fine with my copyrighted work being stolen. As webmaster, Mr. Rupp, it seems you would be in an excellent position to have posted my work to the AHSGR website. Is that the case? A question, not an accusation. There has been collection of my emails by an individual posing as someone disgruntled with AHSGR, gathering my words and running to the board to pass my emails around. Did you coordinate that effort? I would like to know who did coordinate that. Diane did tell me this was going on. People have to be very insecure to worry about what I think. The move to give SOAR obituaries to LDS' familysearch.org website is a positive move. Bill Pickelhaupt