For those who may be a little nervous about using the new message boards, I copied this message from Jake Gehring as he explained it much better than I can. I am enjoying the new format of the boards, example from the same screen I can post an obituary, biography, marriage record, birth record, bible, pension, will and there may be a couple more. You choose from a drop down menu what you are posting. More about the search capabilities below. MESSAGE FROM THE ROOTSWEB HOME OFFICE by Jake Gehring, RootsWeb Executive Producer (this is only part of the message, complete message was previously published by RootsWeb.com, Inc., RootsWeb Review: RootsWeb's Genealogy News, Vol. 4, No. 29, 18 July 2001. RootsWeb: http://www.rootsweb.com/) ".... The new system shows search results ranked by relevance -- meaning that the system will display the best hits first. For example, messages that contain all of your terms are ranked higher than those that contain only some. Here are a couple of additional search tips: Wildcard Searching. The new message boards allow wildcard searching as long as the user specifies at least the first three characters in the word (i.e., users can search for "gehr*" to find "gehring, gehrig, gehrke," etc.). Search Operators. New functionality allows users to add powerful operators to their search terms to affect results. These operators, the plus and minus signs, are placed just before your search terms and function like popular Internet search engines Yahoo! and AltaVista. If you put a plus (+) sign in front of any word, that word *must* appear in a message for it to be a match. If there are terms that you want to exclude (you don't want to see messages in which these terms appear), you can place a minus sign (-) in front of them. For example, a search for "+gehring heinrich -baden" will return only those hits that contain the word "gehring" but not the word "baden", and in this group any messages containing "heinrich" will be displayed before those that don't. Try out these new search features next time you visit the boards. Happy hunting!" Previously published by RootsWeb.com, Inc., RootsWeb Review: RootsWeb's Genealogy News, Vol. 4, No. 29, 18 July 2001. RootsWeb: http://www.rootsweb.com/ Kay Griffin Snow