No Richard, I cannot direct you to our private lists. Well, I could but you cannot get on them anyway. Ancestry got a patent for a robot that spiders sites and lets them grab copies of pages from those web sites. Dick provided a line to that information. They put that up on Ancestry and they call Internet Biographical Collection. The people donated those files to USGenWeb or ILGenWeb or USGenNet or put them on their private web sites -- and now they are on Ancestry, free today but only AFTER an outcry and no promise they will be free next week -- not that an Ancestry promise means much. To me what Ancestry is doing is stealing, taking files without permission. Better it may be a copyright violation if they picked the wrong file. Obviously I am not explaining it well enough for you so I am giving up. Call Central. <g> I suspect this has something to do with the LDS going into competition with Ancestry as it digitalizes all its records and puts them online FREE. It has more records than Ancestry could ever hope to have and they are FREE. And, interestingly, the digitalization is progressing at a much more rapid pace than they original estimated. I'm participating in their beta tests and their search engines are pretty amazing. Cheryl

Ok Richard, my friend, here it is from the horse's mouth. The National Chairperson of USGenWeb is Scott Burow* -- for another day or so anyway. He made the official complaint for USGenWeb. He just received the official reply from Anna Fechter, Community Operations Manager, The Generations Network, less than an hour ago. Here is the part I can share: "Earlier this week we launched the Internet Biographical Collection on Ancestry.com <http://ancestry.com/>. Our goal was to offer members a search engine that focused primarily on genealogy resources. We intended this collection to help surface family history information that many people would not be able to find easily because it is often scattered among numerous websites across the Internet. We cached individual Web pages in an effort to preserve history - if a Web page featuring important family history information were taken down in the future, a cached version would still be available. Many people have expressed concerns about the collection and the search engine we created on Ancestry.com <http://ancestry.com/>. We recognize the significant time and resources members of the genealogical community invest to make their family history research available online. Over the past few days we have reevaluated this collection's goals, caching and crawling ability, and user experience. We have decided to remove this collection and search engine from Ancestry.com <http://ancestry.com/> for the time being. We are still dedicated to providing family historians the online tools and aggregated records that make it easier to trace their family tree and will work to develop a solution that meets those needs in a way that will be most beneficial to our customers and the community." So you don't have to worry about understanding it anymore because it isn't there. <G> Cheryl Rothwell *Scott is Chair of ILGenWeb.