I have just got back from Texas and am endeavouring to stay awake till tonight to beat the jetlag, so have been catching up on the list mail and personal e-mail which has accumulated over the last couple of weeks. Fortunately my son, who had to stay behind to go to college, had the sense to update the virus checker while I was away!! Christine, I will get round to answering your various mails tomorrow, and Katrina this will help to explain why I haven't written to you about the Mathers - I promise to do so very soon. My husband is descended from the daughter of Lachlan ROSS and Hannah MATHER of Eriboll. Two of their sons, John Clark ROSS and William Fraser Mather ROSS, emigrated to Texas and founded a little place called Rossville near San Antonio. On Saturday some 60-70 descendants of John and William Ross assembled in Rossville for a barbecue and Rod and I were given a huge welcome. It was great to meet so many people with whom I had been in e-mail correspondence for several years. Listers may remember that I found valuable information about how John came to emigrate from 'Memoirs of a Highland Gentleman' by Evander McIver. A descendant of John Clark ROSS turned up at the reunion with the original copy of the book sent out to Texas in 1905, complete with newspaper cuttings of the ROSS family that John had pasted inside the cover. There simply wasn't time to look properly at everything that people brought, so photocopiers and scanners are going to be working overtime this week! Rossville was by-passed by the railroad and is now really just a crossroads, but I was able to see the graves of John and William buried there, along with numerous descendants, and several family members who now live elsewhere in the US have already put their own tombstones there, with just the date of death to be filled in, to make sure their relatives know they want to be buried in Rossville!!! A historical marker by the side of the road tells of the two brothers and their journey from Scotland. The temperature was well into the 90s on Saturday so they must have noticed a big difference from Eriboll! We had a two week holiday touring Louisiana and Texas prior to the reunion, and were made very welcome everywhere we went. Maybe New Orleans thought to make us feel at home by sending a deluge by the name of tropical storm Isidore the day after our arrival, but we thought 25 inches of rain in one day was a tad over the top. It was quite exciting wading back to the hotel with water up to our knees, but it had all been pumped away the next day. Here in South Wales places flood with six inches of rain and it takes WEEKS to drain away!! Glad to see the list has still been beavering away in my absence Sue Bleary eyed in Cardiff