The wife if a distant cousin of mine in Conway, MO, was given several years of the Weekly Conway newspaper. She recently sent me about five years of them, mid-l940's, war years, etc. They contain weekly news from Rader, Shady Grove, Sunny Slope, Happy Home, Reed, etc and also contain news about people from Phillipsburg, NIangua, Forkner's Hill, Warden's Chapel, and occasionally Lebanon and Marshfield. They also have news about people who had lived in Conway and left, or whose families were still there. It is local and newsy. I was loaned these newspapers for the purpose of copying them so they could be maintained in some sort of hard copy form. They are getting very old and brittle, and I have been copying just these five years since before Christmas. There are several more years of papers that are also going to be sent to me for the same purpose...copying and preservation...and the ones I have not yet received are from earlier years. Since I have had a hard time getting Conway and Lebanon newspapers loaned on microfilm, I thought many of you might also have the same problem. I know that only some of you on the list have/had family in this part of Laclede County, but here is what I am proposing: if no one has an objection, I will go through these newspapers and by date, list the obits, marriages, and anything that is relevant to research, or anything that might be of interest in general. I cannot transcribe all the news, and it will be hard for me to scan articles, but I will send out the postings, one or two papers at a time, put in what I think is relevant, and then give everyone time to read it and reply if there is anything of interest to them. This will probably take months, but I am willing to do it if people are interested and think it could be of value to them. By "all the news" above, I mean that I am not going to list who had Sunday dinner with whom, who had a cow for sale, etc. But if someone had an accident or was seriously ill, had a probate published, etc., there was usually a front page piece about it. If this is acceptable to the list, then I will need one or two people to help as follows: the original newspapers are going to be offered to the Laclede County Historical Society; if they don't want the originals, I will send them a copy and offer the originals to the Webster County Historical Society, which has its own museum and downstairs reference room in the old Carnegie Library in Marshfield. In order to aid researchers, I would like one or two of you on the list to take the information as I post it and put it into an Index by date and an Index by alphabet, referencing the date. The first index shouldn't be too hard, all you will have to do is take my postings, clean them up, and put them into one document by newspaper edition, in chronological order, as they are posted. This was very kindly done for the journals I posted last year. The second document would take longer because you would have to take each item, alphabetize it and put it into one alphabetical document. Would anyone be willing to do one or two of these lists if it is agreed that I should post the information? As with the journals, I can't promise how fast I can go through this information, but I would be willing to start it and see how it goes. If you have family in any of the areas I mentioned above, please let me know and give me the surnames so I can watch for them. Also, let me know what you think about this latest idea of mine. I have a stack of Lebanon Daily Records with old photos in them and will try to get them posted by the weekend. I also have some information I promised to people a few weeks ago (old obits etc) and I will get that out of the way before I start the other newspaper project. Martha