Hi, gang - Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Below is a question Roy Austin posed for all of us a couple of weeks ago that I am just now getting around to posting on the list: "A thought question that you might want to pose to the mail list. I have approximately 40 binders of research materials, copies of documents, census, courthouse records, marriage licenses, etc. plus pictures, an old schoolbell from the Buckley schoolhouse my grandfather attended and published books on GA, AL, LA and ARK counties, cemeteries, census, marriages, land, etc. My 16 year old daughter jokingly asked one day in the car, "Dad,what do expect me to do with all of that "stuff" when you die?" I told her that hopefully that time would be a long way off, but when the time came I expected that she would build a house large enough to take care of it all. After getting past the "yeah, right" response, it got me to thinking, especially considering the paragraph above. Where will all of this effort and resources end up? I don't think that the Union Parish library currently has a true appreciation for the material that they would get, though I believe that they graciously accept donations of printed materials when the get them. The Lincoln Parish library in Ruston and the Louisiana collection at Tech in Ruston will take them, but how does that really help the Union Parish researcher? I'd be interested in what the other researchers plan to do with their materials, especially if there's not an immediate family member that is currently interested. Roy" Of course, most of us involved here are trying as hard and fast as we can to get as much data as we can online, but there aren't enough volunteers to get it done free. I just never feel my data is complete enough to contribute it to something like World Family Tree, even though I've found that in most cases, it's more complete than the ones I've found there. Can any of us be really sure that the world wide web is going to go on forever? Will our data always be out there? I saw something last night on Discovery that showed the Vatican preserving deteriorating documents, like a letter from Leonard da Vinci in which the iron in the ink is destroying the paper beneath, so the paper has hundreds of little razor-like slits in it. They are scanning the documents and saving them on CD Roms, which are archived in individual cases. One CD Rom will hold a lot of data, and some place like La Tech might be more willing to hang on to them than cartons and cartons of deteriorating paper. What does everyone else think? Karen Karen Mabry Rice, USGenWeb Archives Coordinator Union Parish, Lousiana http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/la/union.htm