I expect I should explain this in more detail..... The traditional mailing list "roll call" is what's not permitted here. If you haven't run into those, what they usually are is dozens to hundreds of people posting emails with the identical subject ("roll call") and message bodies of this type: "Looking for Jones, Smith, Johnson, Jackson, Wilson" The reason that's not a good idea, and the reason it's not permitted here is this: First: 900 of those in one's mailbox in a two or three day period is overwhelming. Dozens of people leave the list, feeling rather mailbombed. Second: Unlike most list posts, you can't pick and choose which ones are useful for you to read: there's no clue in the subject line whether it has the remotest thing to do with anyone you're kin to. You have to read all 900 of those messages in their entirety to have a clue....something we don't all have time to do. Third: Just listing surnames (even if, presumably, they're only one's Missouri surnames) may well not be enough information to be useful....especially if it's a common name. Using an example from my own family: If I tell you I'm looking for Robertsons and nothing else, in the end it's going to waste your time and mine, if 20 or 30 people on the list then need to write to me to see if I'm talking about their 1890 Robertsons in Kansas City, or their 1930 Robertsons in St. Louis. On the other hand, if I say up front that I'm looking at Robertsons in Greene County, particularly NW Greene County, from 1835 on, and you know your Robertsons never went south of St. Louis, you already know that the likelihood of a tie is much lower. If I give you at least some of the first names in my line, that helps you even more..... So what ends up happening on a large list when hundreds of people post with just "roll call" as a subject is that two-thirds or more of the folks on the list delete them unread rather than wade thru them all---making the whole exercise rather pointless. (That's not necessarily true on *small* lists, covering just a surname or a small area like a county; it does tend to be true on large lists or lists covering a state or larger territory.) More conventional queries, of course, are always welcome---putting the surname or location in the subject line, giving more information than just the surname in the body... -- Megan "Piglet" Zurawicz listpig@earthlink.net piglet170@attbi.com