Alice, Like you, I have been swamped going through approximately 1500 messages since Thursday afternoon on the board administrators' mailing list. Most people don't have the time or patience to wade through that mess, so the same questions and comments are being repeated over & over again. I have seen a significant slow-down today though--I guess because many people had to go back to work today. I'll admit that the procedure for combining the old GenConnect and FamilyHistory query boards was not well implemented, but I'm in favor of the overall goal and will like to have the ability to see all of the messages in one place. I'm the administrator for two surname boards: Bullock & Medbury. In the case of Bristol Co., MA, I have the mailing list but not the query board. (But I do work with the Bristol co. board admin.) It's amazing how resistant some people are to change. Some of them are making wild accusations about Amazon.com trying to sell the info on CD ROMS. Some think they're harvesting email addresses for spamming purposes. And there is the matter Alice mentioned about them taking away people's copyrights. Others said that they deliberately put bugs in the system to discourage admins so they can do away with them altogether. It's really wild! But, like Alice said, they're getting the kinks worked out. Those poor programmers and support folks have hardly had any sleep since the Thursday announcement of the new system. The only way any of this will affect a mailing list is if a "gateway" is opened between the corresponding query board. The admins of both the board and the list have to open their ends of the gateway which results in copies of messages to the board being copied to the list. So if there is a gateway between a Mendon board and the Mendon mailing list, messages posted to the board will be copied to the list. People can access the boards through RootsWeb, ancestry.com, or MyFamily.com. Anyone can read the board messages, but in order to post to the boards, they must sign up for an account (if they don't already have one.) Of course many of us already had accounts for the Ancestry databases and/or census records, so nothing new is required of us. Alice, I've seen a slowdown of messages on the MA & RI state mailing lists also. I think it is just the normal vacation time slump. On another subject--I am currently working on transcribing Blackmar/Blackmer/Blackmore data from two old manuscripts, plus checking them against VRs, wills, etc. This family, though most were from RI, did marry with some of the Mendon names we have been discussing. If any of you have any information or questions on this surname, I'd like to hear from you. Jim Bullock Littleton, CO