Today, January 1st 1998, we get officially under way here at The Conference of Australian History (ROOTSWEB AUSTRALIA) - a new, free, non-commercial service for genealogists and historians. It is a part of the highly regarded and respected world genealogy service called ROOTSWEB. It is neither a Newsgroup nor a Bulletin Board - it exhibits attributes of both, but is in fact neither. Rather, it operates on the Internet as a perpetual Conference about Australian History, hence its title and scope. To maintain standards and proper netiquette, it will be moderated. The Conference of Australian History focuses on tracing family roots, immigration, convicts - including transportation and criminal sources in the UK and Ireland, shipping - passengers, crews, ships, voyages - demography, place names, family movements, land titles, locating missing persons (dead or alive !), trades, genealogy on the internet and indeed all the broader aspects of Australian history. To subscribe, all you need to do is send an email to AUSTRALIA-L-request@rootsweb.com and place the word subscribe in the text of the message, case sensitive, and no other words whatsoever in the body of the message; likewise, the subject field should be left blank. You will receive an acknowledgement which you should keep safely, as it will tell you how to get out of here ! It will also explain how the conference works, the benefits and what the options are. From thereon, you will receive copies of all the mail and topics in the conference automatically - (you don't even have to go and get it) - when you log on to the Internet. You are then able to read, consider and perhaps compose a response to them if you wish, at your leisure offline. Of course, you are welcome to lurk in the background and just enjoy the discussions if you want to. There are no catches here ! I hope you will be able to contribute. John Snelson Moderator If you'd like further information about the Conference of Australian History before subscribing, you can send a message directly to John Snelson (jsnelson@ozemail.com.au) or you can take a voyage to the website at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~jsnelson/descent.html