I hope users of this list realize that queries to this list are filed and archived and will be used for years to come. Therefore: It is important to have future researchers in mind when you write. If you want a reply years later, you might want to include an address or be sure to keep the same email address or keep your data on World Connect at Rootsweb with current email address. Include dates or approximate dates and locations whenever possible--without that everything is almost useless. Russell is a HUGE surname. Not all Russells are related or even come from the same country. There are French and German and Caribbean Russells etc. Some write as if we should all know a fellow Russell just by their first name. Good luck. There are literally millions of John, William, and Mary Russells. You MUST have approximate date and location to have any hope of making contact. Attach the spouse and any children's names to anything you send--anything to add a uniqueness to your Russell. Dead people fade into history. Birth, death, marriage date, offspring and LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION become all that remains of them. With dates and location, one has hope of finding them in RECORDS. Genealogy is not a hobby of just getting information from willing strangers. That method can only be a start a helpful hint, after that it is RECORDS, PROOFS, RESEARCH, DOCUMENTATION. I really question attaching the very informal Genforum entries to this list. Do we really want to archive for posterity, "Hi, I think you are right." "My grandmother has a cousin named John Russell. Do you know a John Russell." I hang onto to this list and try to add information as I have it especially for the Archives, but I go weeks just deleting conversations with no specifics. Maybe I am exaggerating but you get the point. The more we use the net for genealogy, the more lazy it all seems. People looking for information--not having done even the most basic things like census lookups to try to pin point their families. People with no idea about estimating the birthdates of their grandparents and grandparents. These types of users are cluttering up the various lists with very little useful information. I don't mean to sound snobby, but as far as I am concerned genealogy is a detail oriented hobby that takes serious thoughtfulness and planning. One digs and documents and tries to prove and solve a never ending chain of riddles. I love helping people and I have certainly been helped, but I don't want to be involved with just lackadaisical types who do not seem to really understand research methods at all or at least want to learn them. I have given information I had worked hard on and spent money on only to later find it written up on the net by the receiver as their heroic work, with errors I might add. One way to honor another's work is to include the donor's name in your footnotes and sources. You do know what those are, don't you? I don't mean to sound grumpy. But I do get frustrated and more and more I find the various family list I use to be time wasters. I have unsubscribed to many as a waste of my time. I find everywhere that the original serious genealogists contributors are more and more silent on most of the lists. People used to send in lots of wills, and data to lists. Now is it more and more just queries, many of which lack enough basics to be very helpful. Besides just queries I think we could share methods and approaches and how to's on these lists. Instead of just asking for your great grandmother, Mary Russell, you might tell us all that you have done to find her. I may not know any data on her, but I would certainly be willing to make suggestions on what else you could do. So please ask how to questions. Please input known data for the idea that this list becomes an archive for future researchers. Please make a point of pausing and including HOW you know a thing too. Every time you input a date or fact into your data, stop and put HOW you know that or at least the fact that you have no source and it is just undocumented stuff you got off the net. Also we are getting more and more queries from the UK and Australia. This is great, but we need now to put USA or UK or AUS in front of a query. I need the UK people to add UK to their entries because I often do not at first recognize the counties and locations in Great Britain and I am sure the Brits and Australians would appreciate us using USA too. We are all receiving a lot of things to read and any help in eliminating reading things that can have no relevance to each other helps to cut down what we have to peruse. Anyway my thoughts. Sorry for any offense taken, but not for trying to improve these lists.. Tom --