Greetings fellow researchers, My apologies for many of you receiving this twice. I'm sending both to ILCLAY-L and to all Clay Co Researchers. I've made some changes to the Clay Co IL GenWeb site, and hope you'll drop by, take a look, and let me know what I can do to improve it. The biggest is the way YOUR queries and surname registrations are entered, and viewed. Let me describe briefly why the changes. I've adopted another county (Bond Co IL -- a nearby neighbor to Clay to the west) where I have some roots as well. I've not made any changes there (probably will), but did find that they use a semi-automated way of posting queries and surname registrations. (The method has been available for a few months, but I hadn't taken time to implement it for Clay Co.) The more I dug into it, the more I liked it because: 1) It does a better and more consistant job than I can do manually. During the conversion from the "old" to the "new" I was shooked by the number of careless mistakes that I had made that may have prevented proper access to some of the information you had posted. 2) Because a number of sites across the country are using this method, it allows for people (like yourselves) to access more information in your research. You and others can rapidly search for common surnames within your county, state, or country (maybe globally). In a day or two I will be adding this to our site. It's an overnight process, and I didn't want to wait before making it available to you. 3) It will take less of my time, once I become more familiar with the process. The new system stores all your queries and surnames in a database, then builds 3 types of indexes: Queries, Surnames, Researchers. The Queries is pretty much like the old query listing that we had, except it has links to the Surnames and Researchers. The Surname index lists all the Researchers who have entered them, like previously. The Researchers index is new -- It lists all Researchers, all the Queries and Surnames they are interested in, e-mail and personal webpages. Access to the new system is through the item called "Queries & Surnames". The "old" system will be left inplace for a few days, but no new entries will be added to it. To add new entries, click on the "Queries & Surnames" link; then click on "Enter your Query or Surnames"; fill in the form (READ THE INSTRUCTIONS, please), verify the information; press the "Send This to Clay County" button. In a few seconds (longer if the system is busy) your query / surnames will be available for you and others to view under the "Submissions not yet indexed" link. Periodically I will check for entries, and add your entry to the "indexed" portion of the system. If you've made it this far -- I'm amazed. I've rambled on too long. Constructive comments are always welcome. If you don't like it, please tell me privately. Thank You, Ted Researching BREMER, CASH, CORNELIUS, DRANGMEISTER, GROENEWOLD, HARTWIG, HELM, JAMES, JENNINGS, JOHNSON, MANNING, MAXEY, MORTENSEN, PIEPHO, SEEGERS See these and more at: http://www.mindspring.com/~casht Bond Co, IL Coordinator for USGenWeb: http://www.rootsweb.com/~ilbond Clay Co, IL Coordinator for USGenWeb: http://www.rootsweb.com/~ilclay Clay Co, IL Genealogy Mailing list - mailto:ILCLAY-L@rootsweb.com