The West Sussex Record Office (WSRO) currently have a problem concerning old Family History programs which I am trying to help them to resolve and I am asking for your help. Over the past 20 or so years, WSRO have received genealogy data deposited by individual researchers, many of whom have passed away in the intervening years. Of course, this data should have been deposited in GEDCOM format so that it can easily be transferred to a modern program, but much of it is in an old program's native format and now cannot be retrieved without the parent program. Some of this data will have been produced on formats that ran under Win 3.1 or Win95 operating systems and some under MS DOS. Yes, these really are very old programs, many of which do not exist today. With the help of a number of friends who have donated components that would otherwise have been binned, I have built a computer tower upon which I have loaded MS DOS and Win98 SE. After a lot of frustration and three days solid work, I now have a stable system up and running. I had forgotten just how "umpty" Win98 SE could be! The computer currently has a 3.5" floppy drive, a CD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive, so data can be transferred from/to different types of storage media. The idea is that this will be used as a stand alone computer in the Conservation Department at WSRO and which will be used to convert this old data into a modern format so that it is accessible to future generations of researchers. I am now asking for your help to load some very old family history programs onto this computer. I don't want any copyright or licensing problems to occur, so these must be programs which you have purchased and used in the past *and* which you no longer have a use for. I have copies of Family Tree Maker and Brother's Keeper, but there were a host of other programs available 10 or more years ago such as Reunion, Clooz, Ancestral Quest, Genius, Trees, Cumberland Family Tree and many, many more. Could you search through your old floppy disk and CD-ROM boxes to see what you might have to donate to this project, please? If you find something which may be of use, could you please send an E-mail to me off-List to woolgar@one-name.org giving me the details of the program's name and version number and whether it is on floppy disk or CD. I also have a need for the following items if anyone has them tucked away somewhere: 1 A copy of Lotus's AmiPro program. This was a program that was issued as a stand-alone and also as part of the first edition of Smart Suite around the mid-1990's. I understand that it was particularly popular in America and Canada; 2 A 56k standard modem card, so that I can get online to load a free AV program; 3 A 5.25" floppy drive, just in case some data turns up on that type of floppy disk. I am going to post this message to a couple of other Lists, so please forgive me if you should receive multiple copies. Best wishes Marion Woolgar Bognor Regis, West Sussex SFHG NO: 3323