i'm afraid i have to say something about the way the list has been going the last few weeks. ever since Andrea commented on the quietness, there has been a flood of criticism of what has always been the very best genealogy list i have ever been on--full of invaluable information, and with expert hands-on 'listmastering' by andrea. i used to look forward to reading it. now i dread it...i'm weary of the 'this list isn't in fourteen different european languages' complaints, and the carping about andrea's plans for a web site reminds me of people who stand with arms folded while you paint a wall and then say 'you missed a spot.' all of this begs the original issue which is that the list's vitality depends ultimately on the LIST MEMBERS. i freely admit that i have not been a very valuable asset here myself, doing little beyond posting queries about my elusive Franciscos. but i take total responsibility for that. i've had serious job and health problems that have virtually curtailed any genealogical research other than keeping up with a few lists and responding to genealogy-related email--and often the only response i can give is 'i think i have some info on that in my files and will get it to you when i am able.' the last thing i would EVER think to do is to blame my failure to participate more and to come up with information of interest to my fellow listees on Andrea! going back over the folder i have of email i considered worth keeping from this list, 95% was posted BY ANDREA and no one else. Roy Day wrote, >> By providing all the information to callers at the web site, as would be the >> case with your proposal, there will be a disincentive to join the list in my opinion this is absolutely NOT TRUE. no web site no matter how informative can ever be complete, and posting info that is already known SAVES time on the list (and andrea's time as listmaster) because there's no need to repeat info current listees already know every time someone new joins...she can just refer them to the site (there is also the archives, but some people are never going to bother with that, and in the past few months it was not complete anyway). it has frustrated me that on virtually every Rootsweb list i am on, the same questions, some of them very basic, keep coming up. (on the NY county lists, every 3 days someone asks how to get NY state vital records.) some of the questions in my opinion should not even be posted to the list...that includes ANYTHING that someone could find out from a good dictionary or atlas (which no one seriously purporting to get into genealogy can fail to own), and basics like 'what is a huguenot' for which there are umpteen web sites that respond to a search with 'huguenot' as a key word (if the person doesn't own an encyclopedia). maybe i'm just old fashioned, having started in genealogy ten years ago when there was no internet--back then if you were too lazy to do research you were SOL unless you could afford to pay for the skills of a real genealogist. i didn't think when i joined these Rootsweb lists that the point of them was to let lazy amateurs use other listees as webster's or a hammond atlas or in any other way as a substitute for common sense and basic research skills *i* learned from my grade school librarian. i thought the point was to share information we have discovered about our own lines, to meet others researching those lines, to discover information that other listees have dug up on the list topic in general and to contribute what we have dug up on it. no web site, no matter how well maintained, can EVER be as dynamic as a list. what a website WILL do is cut down on the 'newbie' garbage. all the lists other than Rootsweb that i have been on in my 5 plus years online, covering a variety of topics, have a FAQ which is sent to all listees upon joining, which answers ALL the typical newbie questions (like 'what is a huguenot.') on the lists where posts are filtered through a listmaster (and i have several friends who are listmasters on such lists) posts that show the person has not read the FAQ are bounced back with a direction that they do so, not posted to the list as a whole; if the posts are automatic, the listmaster directs the questioner to the FAQ. if the person persists in wasting bandwidth, they are unsubbed by the listmeister. if my NY county lists had a FAQ, updated as necessary by the listmaster with the help of the listees, i wouldn't have to plow through the same explanation about vital records several times a week. putting the info on a web site to which all new listees were directed would also cut down on mind-numbing repetition of the basics. if someone CAN get everything they need off the site, why SHOULD they join the list? obviously they want static data, not dynamic give and take. seems to me a lot of the 'silent listees' only want static data too...not 'class participation.' andrea was trying to figure out how to encourage the silent ones to participate...most of what she got back is 'well if YOU'd do this and that and this and that, THEN the list would be good.' genealogists with real interest in the subject of this list will not be deterred by a web site with lots of information, but attracted. lazyboneses won't join, and so what? they want only to grab some easily available info off the net to satisfy a momentary itch to 'find my ancesters' (the usual misspelling)', not do real genealogical research and share it with other researchers. if i ran a list, the third time someone submitted a post with an uninformative or misleading subject line they'd be gone. once is ignorance, twice can be haste or absentmindedness...3 times is apathy or stupidity. i'd rather be on a list of ten true genealogists who were engaging in dialogue than one with hundreds of 'lurkers', a few true participants, and a workhorse of a listmaster turning him/herself inside out trying to pick up the slack, only to be told 'now do a double backflip for me.' as i said, i haven't shown much evidence of being a real genealogist myself since i've been on the list. but starting from one piece of paper from my mother (most of the info on which turned out to be wrong) and a handful of names she gave me that she got from her mother (no one on that side talked much about origins, for various reasons, and my dad died when i was a baby and i hadn't had contact with his family in almost 30 years), i not only traced all but one of the my great grandparents' lines back to europe, but then traced those families DOWN from the g gparent level in order to contact my living relatives down to my generation. and i did it before there was a web, by sitting 8 hours a day at the genealogy libraries going through musty books, or at the national archives cranking a microfilm reader till i got bursitis in my shoulder. that is why it drives me insane to see people ask 'what is a huguenot'--if i NEVER see that asked again i would be quite happy. maybe i'm the one who's crazy to wonder why anyone would JOIN a huguenot list without knowing whether it was a religion, a nationality, or a kind of donut. i'm sorry if this offends someone. but the critiquing of and carping at Andrea has offended me and i just had to say so. whether or not this list is translated into swahili or Andrea puts the name of every single huguenot ever born and his uncle Francois on a web site, it's a fantastic list and she's a fantastic listmaster! and until i'm putting into this list even a fraction of what she does, i refuse to ask her to do more or do things differently. Poor-Excuse-for-a-Listmember Chris in California -- Still there is a small difference between 'to know' and 'to do'. As long as the subconscious is not educated, the easiest thing in the world faces insurmountable difficulties. ~Itsuo Tsuda