Friends, As most of you know, we have a collection of Primitive Baptist church records, including some for Saline and Hamilton counties, as well as White and others in southern Illinois. Due to these records having information about living people, we do not feel it is appropriate to publish them in book form. If any of the area genealogical or historical societies which have copies of these records intend to do so, we cannot prevent them, but would just say that the people who turned such records (or copies of them) over to the societies, probably did not want them to be published, but might not have thought about that possibility, but didn't know what else to do with them. In keeping with the manner in which we conduct our churches - based on contributions given as people purpose in their hearts rather than any kind of system of buying and selling or other type of business venture or taxation, we conduct our library as volunteers and accept voluntary contributions from those who are able and wish to help, and do not charge others who are not able for our time. So far this has worked for us for almost 14 years. We do desire to share the information we have about the history of the churches, with those who are interested in it, and we will do this as stated above, without charging for it. If those who have copies of records refuse to share copies with us, on account of wishing to publish and sell books containing the same information that we intend to freely share, then we cannot make them do so. Our only recourse would be to encourage them to reconsider their position, and allow us to copy such records, as we are not intending to compete with them in the sale of books, records, etc., at all. We presume to say that it is our opinion that researchers whom we help with information from our database, our books, histories, etc., will not refrain from buying the books published by the historical societies on our account, because we will not sell copies of our church records. We know that our church people for all these generations would not want us to sell the records in book form, but they would want us to preserve them, and to share what they contain in an appropriate manner, with their interested descendants. I welcome anyone's thoughts on this who wishes to comment pro or con. I am not sure what records are located in the societies in Saline and Hamilton counties, because when I inquired they did not reply. Again, I would like to encourage the people involved to cooperate with us, rather than try to create a situation which would hurt everyone involved. Elder Robert Webb ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.