"We are developing a new archive system, which we will roll out in a few weeks. On Sept. 29 our current archives were closed to new stories while we build our new system... Our online archives are provided at no cost to the user. The archives contain most staff-written stories published in the Times Union from March 1986 through September 2008 (obituaries since 1993)." I phoned Times Union to find out if the archives would be free after the new system was put in place. It will be. They used to charge $2 for each article that you viewed in the archives. They weren't selling enough articles. They make most of their money from the online advertising. I was told that a breaking news story got as many hits in one day as the entire archives got in a full year. So, they want to greatly increase the useage of the archives even if they have to give free access to the articles. Obituaries are included in the archives, but not the photo that might have accompanied the obituary (today, about 20-30% of the obituaries include a photo). As in the past, the obituaries will also be available free on Legacy for one year. I was told that the advantage on the Legacy site is a better search engine. However, I know you can only search for the deceased person's name. The Times Union archives would allow you to search for Valentine and Ralph and thereby get a hit for the son of the deceased person who was listed only by first name. Obituaries are easy to identify when you are looking through a lot of hits. A person's name makes up the complete title of the hit. Their new archives will be available about February 15. It will contain all of the articles that were archived in the past, plus the ones since September. TU is currently merging the old articles archived under that old system into the new system. Once available, their search engine will be different from the one available today. But, until then I would like to make some suggestions for using the current search engine. I used the free archives a great deal yesterday when I found it. When you arrive at the site, the search engine is set up to use certain default settings. Even if you know the year a person died, it would also make sense to search for occurences of his/her name in deed transfer notices and news articles (in other words, everything on the site). For my own use, I did the following: I changed the year to "All Years." I changed the order of the articles to "from oldest to newest" although that won't matter to most people. You might change it to "relevance" although I couldn't tell what criteria were used. I changed the limit to 250 articles. If you leave it at 25, that is all the hits you will get, and you won't be able to see any of the rest. The "connector" can be important. I did a search for a surname alone. It got too many hits because a staff member had the same name, and he wrote a lot of articles. I set the connector to "But not" and entered the name Robert. That eliminated some of his articles, but he also publishes under the name Bob. So... I tried something that sometimes works with search engines even if they don't tell you about it. In the "search words" box, after the surname and a space, I typed the following: "BUTNOT Bob" That allowed me to get rid of Robert and Bob in a single search. BUTNOT does not have to be capitalized, but there can't be a space between the words. Some search engines may require it to be in caps. Unless you use your Back button to return to the search engine, all of your settings will revert back to the default settings. Without knowing it, you may end up searching for 2008 only. http://www.timesunion.com/archives/ Obituaries in the Times Union appear only if someone pays for their publication. The following counties are generally included: Albany and Rensselaer have the most, but also Columbia, Saratoga and Schenectady. Greene and Schoharie are only occasionally represented. There also some for people who died outside the area (like Florida) who formerly lived locally. News articles get a much wider local coverage than the obituaries, so the site is worth using even if you are not looking for an obituary. Sorry for the length of this email. Sometimes I just don't know what to leave out. Cliff Lamere