Dear listmembers: Have you ever stopped to think who brings the services of Rootsweb to us. Well it's Brian Leverich and his wife Karen Isaacson. They started Rootsweb some years ago out of their home in Frazier Park CA, a mountain community nestled between Los Angeles and Bakersfield. Under CA's business laws, Rootsweb is what they call a simple "Mom and Pop" organization.....nothing really fancy about it. They solely rely on contributions from people like you to help pay for the day-to-day expenses, as well as supplementing funding out of their own pockets. The expenses are mounting daily, much more then they can afford themselves. Rootsweb is in the process of gaining non-profit status, but the legalities involved is mind boggling as well as expensive. Hopefully in the future Rootsweb will be able to obtain contributions through foundations and grant money to keep this operation going. This last year Rootsweb was lucky enough to gain a corporate sponsor to help defray some of the mounting costs. But in this world of takeovers and buy outs, Palladium Software was bought out by the Broderbund/Learning Co. conglomerate. Rootsweb is about to lose this valuable sponsor soon, and they have resorted to taking a $25,000 loan to help offset the expenses. Remember loans have to be repaid! Rootsweb needs our help badly! Please remember next time you send an email to a list like this, or place a query on one of the many Rootsweb supported USGenWeb sites (by the way, Rootsweb provides server space freely to the USGenWeb), or when you visit the USGenWeb Archives, that someone is paying for all of this so that genealogy on the internet may remain free and accessible to all researchers. Without Rootsweb, our days of visiting signup pages with our credit cards will be the common place practice. You can help support Rootsweb for as little as $12......that's only a $1 a month.....what a deal! For information on how to help fund Rootsweb's future, please visit: http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html Please let's make this a happy holiday for Brian and Karen, and especially for everyone who uses Rootsweb's services. For those of you who are already financial supporters of Rootsweb, I thank you from the bottom on my heart. I wish everyone a Happy Holiday and a prosperous New Year!!! *News letter just received from Brian Leverich and his wife Karen Isaacson!* ===================================================== Karen and I are in the hole on RootsWeb; not only have we not been paid anything, we've been paying out of our pockets for the privilege of working here night and day without weekends or holidays. (Just *today* Karen and I took out a $25,000 loan to cover the fact that the Palladium sponsorship has apparently died with their acquisition by TLC, and to pay for the hardware we're going to need to handle the new users we expect to have after Christmas.) Just so you fully understand what I've told you above, you should be aware that in terms of traffic RootsWeb is one of the *top 25* or so sites on the whole Internet. Folks who can run these sorts of facilities are absurdly rare (there are a few hundred of them in the whole world), and senior system administrators at the other "Top 25" sites generally have salary+benefits+option packages that run in the $200,000-500,000 per year and up range. ### Folks should be clear on the concept that the administration staff at RootsWeb is making a huge contribution to the genealogical community by essentially donating our time. The fact that each of us is personally donating services worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year is part of the reason we find it so depressing that only about 2-6% of our users are choosing to support RootsWeb at all, and that even among our supporters the average contribution is only one-third of what "tens of thousands of genealogists" (the Wall Street Journal) are spending at Ancestry.com. I don't think RootsWeb is going to fold anytime soon. But I'd be lying to you if I didn't tell you that the staff is seriously wondering whether the community values our efforts enough that continuing on with RootsWeb makes sense. The admin staff wants to give the genealogical community a great online genealogical library, but we can't do it if only 2-6% of our users will voluntarily choose to support us. Without more support, RootsWeb can't afford to buy the servers and bandwidth and scanners and such that we need to bring online the whole US Census and the British Birth/Marriage/Death records and all the other resources we'd like to make freely available to the entire community. Maybe Ancestry has it right. Lock up the resources and charge the users through the nose. Oh well. -B Betty Lou Riley List Owner for: OHAdams-L, KYGreenu-L, KYLewis-L, and McGovney-L Instructions at: <http://www.zoomnet.net/~chipmunk/SurnamesMail.html> CC:/CCA:KY Greenup Co. CCA: KY Lewis Co.