Good News! The new Van Buren Co. Message Boards are now on-line! Van Buren Co. was a "guinea pig" county during the development of these boards. I've been involved with several key individuals from the IAGenWeb state organization and with the programmer for the past 60 days or more getting the boards to where they are to this point. Today, we are proudly the first of the boards on-line. Other Iowa counties will be joining us soon. Many of you feel as I do, that it is important that the IAGenWeb project have its own independent boards not affiliated with a for-profit genealogy organization. As a result of the resent reorganization of the GenConnect/Rootsweb/Ancestry/MyFamily boards, we not only lost some important "user friendly" features, we as administrators lost some important tools as well, such as the ability to correct errors in messages and e-mail addresses and to backup the important data. We have restored those features and added new ones. Local control is in our best interests. I would encourage you to explore the new boards and to enter your new queries, obituaries, biographies and other documents. In addition, I would be especially grateful if you would re-submit messages you may have previously submitted to the old GenConnect Boards to the new IAGenWeb Boards. The Van Buren Co. GenWeb site is the first entry point for the majority of those researching Van Buren Co. ancestors. It is to everyone's advantage to post their information on the Van Buren Co. site in order to "connect" with other researchers with common interests. Should you run into any "bugs" in the system that you feel should be brought to someone's attention, please let me know. Questions are always welcomed. And again, thanks in advance for your help in making these new Van Buren Boards a valuable data base of genealogical information. You will find the new messages boards linked from our main Van Buren Co web site. A more direct route is: http://www.rootsweb.com/~iavanbur/IAGenWebBoards.html Rich Lowe «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»¥«¤» Rich Lowe IAVanBuren@web-iowa.com Van Buren Co. IA GenWeb Coordinator http://iagenweb.org/vanburen/ IAVANBUR-L Mail List http://www.rootsweb.com/~iavanbur/how-to-subscribe.html