Pat wrote: "In several recent posts, people, like Lee, have stated that they have upwards of 50,000 people in their database. It brings to mind the question - What will happen to all that work after I die? or better yet - What can I do now to preserve that information? ..." My comments: My New England Ball Project is now over 100,000 people and I am now 73, so the "end game" question is getting more and more relevant. I have several prongs to my plan of attack all of which are detailed in my "estate instructions" under construction: 1. First is how to copy my Second Site website (that includes everyone) to an autorun CD and give that to a bunch of genealogy libraries (NEHGS, Allen, Salt Lake FH library, etc.). That is the short term step limited by future technology, but the easiest and fastest way to dump nearly everything (except details other than names for living people) in a form that might be useful. Haven't decided whether it would be possible to have my website maintained with the appropriate changes to clearly indicate that it is dormant and contact with me no longer possible. 2. Next is to provide my executor with a list of papers, books, and letters in my file cabinets that need to go to a repository along with funding to make it worthwhile for a repository to accept the papers (I have over 1,000 letters over 50 years from Ball families providing info on their families, many unpublished journal reports from other researchers, etc.). 3. I still need to make a list and to provide step by step TMG instructions to print out a bunch of journal reports (each starting with an immigrant Ball individual to North America) that should be duplicated and bound and donated to the same list of libraries that get the Second Site CD. This is the best long-term solution to preserving all of the work I have done, but also the most labor intensive process (to say nothing of potentially costly) of the options. Nonetheless, I am proud of much of the research I have done and to print "books" that include sources for nearly all of the names, dates, and places would be a step above the typical printed genealogy. Duplicating and binding will not be cheap, so this is something that needs to be well detailed for the executor OR already done by me. 4. Biggest item on the wishlist would be to find someone willing to take over my Project or perhaps some parts of my project spread across individuals each interested in only one Ball immigrant and that person's descendants. That is my biggest challenge both for the personal family ancestry part of my database, as well as for the New England Ball Project majority of my database, doubly complicated due to the end of TMG. To the good side of migrating to another software, I do not use any of the witness features of TMG, so my database is pretty close to GEDCOM compatible. I am in good health, so I am hoping that a viable option evolves in the next few years to replace TMG while I am still capable of managing that transition myself. That would make shifting my database or a part of my database to someone else much easier through get having them have the same software I am then using. Dave Ball