dear roots web members, i apologize for my rude web behavior of the past several days. i had typed in caps for the sake of the use of my one good arm, plus, for the sake that not everyone can always read writing typed in lower case letters. johnson county always has and always will mean everything to me. i eat, drink, and sleep johnson county as evidenced by my years of daily journals on johnson county ancestors and people, and my one score plus of volunteer research. i continuously speak about johnson county and southern illinois ancestors at our local church, and have articles written about them in the local church newsletter. our little dog is even named for two civil war veterans from cache twp. i began johnson county research long before there were any of mr. jackson's census indexes, and when the LDS IGI was called CFI, and when there weren't any microfilms of southern illinois vital records that you could order from salt lake city, that you could conveniently research at a local LDS FHC, which were then called branch genealogical libraries. i come from a research "day" when it took a good three hours of going through the Washington D.C.'s national archives' red tape, because of my age at the time, just to be allowed in their microfilm room, and even though i did finally receive permission to enter their microfilm room, i still had to have an adult use the microfilm reader for me, even though i had known how to properly use a microfilm reader for years. the national archives' microfilm copies of the illinois 1850 and 1860 census were much more difficult to read back then, where they were filmed with two pages on a microfilm frame, instead of one page on a frame, and again, as some of you kind others can recall, too, that if you wanted to find an ancestor badly, you had to find their data the old-fashioned way -- you had to rely on yourself to find your ancestor, at least as far as census records are concerned. i come from a day when children weren't allowed in LDS libraries, and yet today, at least at the large LDS library in salt lake city, even infants are allowed. what i earlier stated to the web may not have been right and it may not have been fair, but even as a young person today, i am still remembering how difficult research was twenty to twenty-five years ago, and this is why i was hoping for better research results and techniques. we have all of modern technology has to offer, and hopefully, through God's grace and compassion, we will have even more. research will never be one hundred percent perfect, because we are obviously not living in our great-great-grandfather's day whom we are researching. all i am asking is that we try to improve our research techinques. i know that i will try and that i will try even harder, because i do care about our families' ancestors buried in johnson county, and to me, when i am walking in johnson county's cemeteries, i know that i am walking on sacred and holy ground. johnson county's ancestors will always mean everything to me. sincerely, brad birkner