At 02:05 PM 12/21/99, Tom Pennington wrote: >I am ready to ditch the whole thing and forget Ancestry.com, unlesss >someone tells me how to get around all the ads and ,"wishes to set a >cookie",stuff. When you register, you then choose a user ID and a password, even though you're a guest at no charge. Then when you do the search, and you want to look into one of those "Paid" databases, just click on it. A screen will come up asking for your user ID and password, and you give it the ones you established when you registered. Then you go on into the database at no cost. I spent several hours doing this yesterday, looking for my great grandmother Kate Pennington of Houston County, TX, b abt 1836 or so, and NOT the daughter of Richard who married Charley Beazley. My ggm married William Marion Stowe and bore twin daughters, then vanished from all the records! As for the "wishes to set a cookie" this simply keeps you from having to type in your user ID and password again for every database. If you let it set the cookie, the server can read the cookie later to know that you're already qualified for admission. While I haven't examined the specific cookie that was set, I'm sure that Ancestry.com has encrypted the actual ID and password; this is standard practice for servers that use cookies for ID purposes! While some sites may use cookies for "evil" purposes such as purchase tracking, many others use them only to help you customize the way things look; for that reason it's not a good idea to arbitrarily refuse all cookies -- but it's wise to have some idea of what's going on before you accept them, too! Jim Kyle mailto:[email protected]