I am passing along a letter received from another mailing list, along with my experience with ROOTS WEB. Hope you do not mind, and you will all help out. :) I have been a supporter of ROOTSWEB ever since the switch over from the university servers. I have never regretted one penny I have sent to help with this project. Roots Web has brought me into contact with several of my cousins as well as allowing me to get to know many people that I can honestly say I love like "real" family. Our DRAKE list owner Barb, being one in this category. :) I do hope you will all think about supporting ROOTS WEB with just a few dollars. Does not have to be a lot, but if the thousands of people using the service sent 5 bucks it would add up. :) Thanks, Lynn **************************** Greetings to All, As most of my list members know I seldom comment on RootsWeb or on individual messages on the list. The following I feel is worthy of sending to my lists. I was on several of the Lists when Meiser was Spammed out of existence. RootWeb was gracious enough to take in all of these lists. Nothing of this magnitude comes without a large investment, therefore I have been a Proud Sponsor of RootsWeb since I started my own lists a couple of years ago. Please review the following and Help if you would like to Keep RootsWebs Services available to all. I hope all are having the best of all the Holidays where ever you are. Donald, Listowner - Schleswig-Holstein-Roots-L; Derr-L; Shatto-L, and Shade-L ****************** << Please check this out and help if you can. Thanks, Mike Simmons- Proud sponsor of Rootsweb Here's a letter written by one of the founders of Rootsweb outlining the current situation: My friends - I generally do not bring you news about RootsWeb, whose servers house some 4000 mail lists, including this one, because I know you all get the RootsWeb Review about once a week, which pretty well covers what is going on within RootsWeb. As most of you know, RootsWeb was created by, and is "owned" by Dr. Brian Leverich and his wife Karen Isaacson, both superb computer people and genealogists. They created RootsWeb and they have funded 90% of it out of their own pockets since its creation. This means that they have a houseful of computer equipment, as well as other equipment in a hub elsewhere, that runs all of these lists, as well as web pages and other items for the USGenWeb - the effort is huge and growing by leaps and bounds. However, their corporate sponsor, Palladium, has disappeared into a merger with another company, and that funding has evaporated. It seems unclear whether any other corporation will step forward to help underwrite these huge costs. In the message which Brian sent to the listowner list, he makes the first mention of danger to the whole RootsWeb concept. He is rarely pessimistic, and if he is concerned, then we all need to be concerned. He finds it particularly depressing that only a small percentage (2%-6%) are helping to support RootsWeb in any way, even though there are literally hundreds of thousands of people regularly using the mail lists and the other web pages and items which RootsWeb hosts. You can see that he has taken out a $25,000 loan just to try to keep the equipment growing with the needs of RootsWeb. The bottom line is that if we, as users of these RootsWeb services, cannot help with a few dollars (and it does not have to be much at all, if we all get involved) in support of this fine group, we are in very real danger of losing these mail lists and literally hundreds of web pages of genealogical material(including the JP Images Page and many, many others)that is today available. Please give this some thought, and see if you can find a few dollars that you could donate to RootsWeb to keep this effort alive. I have long said that Brian and Karen cannot forever continue to incur financial hits in the range of ten of thousands of dollars at a time, and still be able to keep RootsWeb alive. Take a look at: http://www.rootsweb.com and you can see how to donate if you wish to do so. I urge you to consider it. It is a great investment. Let's see if we can make it a merrier Christmas for Karen and him and for online genealogists everywhere. ==== Mailing Lists ==== Please do not submit virus alerts, chain letters, or other off-topic material to the list. Vulgarity and personal attacks on other list members are also unwelcome. >> ******************************** END ************** The best to all thought the coming years, Donald, Listowner -- * [email protected] Researching: DRAKE, HULSEY, SHOCKLEY, ROGERS, BAIN. --