Hi, we at the Pioneer Historical Society are writing to the nearby counties to alert you to the dangers of allowing visitors free access to your books and files. This is not directed at anyone on the list. It is to alert you as genealogists to the fact that not all men, and women, are honest - as we have recently discovered. In the past two weeks one of the books of the Pennsylvania Archives was stolen from our library. The loss was not discovered right away because the perpetrator cleverly grabbed a black book from another shelf and put it in the empty space. Please readers, we have not received any bequests from rich men's wills, we have a mortgage to the house we are buying by ourselves, no one gave it to us. And we are a faithful band of volunteers who keep the library open five and a half days a week FREE OF CHARGE TO VISITORS. We cannot afford to buy another series 3, volume 25 as if one could buy only one book of a set of almost 90-100!!! And a book which was published in the late 1800s. Such thefts are ruining our spirit and making us think again about opening our library to strangers. Last year a brand new book on the Hammer family was stolen the first day it was put on the shelf. And one of the volunteers had heard a woman saying, "That's MY family!" Yes, and the family of lots of others of our visitors. Cathy