Dear Wamsley cousins, Wanda has been doing a tremendous job of getting the Wamsleyweb to a growing list of Wamsley researchers. Since I maintain a surname list myself, I know that it can grow very fast and that eventually become too big to manage on a personal computer. Wanda and I have had an exchange of emails, the result of which is that I have started the background stuff to have a Wamsley list hosted by the RootsWeb listserv. If you want to find out what RootsWeb is all about, see http://www.rootsweb.com and to see what surname lists they have, check out the web site: http://www.rootsweb.com/~maillist/surnames/index.html Click on the "Back to the Mailing Lists home page" (under alphabet) to see what other kinds of lists are hosted. Back to why I'm writing this message. I've done all the background work to get the list started on Rootsweb, and have posted all the previously issued Wamsleyweb issues into the archives. I've also subscribed you all to the list. When you post a query, you send it to: Wamsley-L@rootsweb.com You don't need to put Wamsley in the subject line because it will show up automatically in brackets as you see in the subject line of this message. Right now, Wanda plans to continue to put out Wamsleyweb, so if you want to send the message to both places, that's ok, but it may be that she will do the copy/paste that she now does, from the listserv messages. You may be asking, why bother with the listserv? There are several reasons. The first advantage is that you will be able to see the messages right away versus waiting for a bunch to come together as a newsletter. This is called mail mode and is the default. However, if you like having them all grouped together, it's easy to change your "subscription" to digest mode which will be be similar to what you've been getting, but will have an "index" of all the message subject lines at the top. Or you can wait til Wanda sends it out. Next advantage is that all the messages are archived and are searchable on the web. You want to search for any messages that have been posted before you subscribed (like the previous Wamsleyweb issues)? Searches can be done, quite easily. And the Rootsweb people are making it even easier and will have something called "threaded" archives available in a month or so, so either way can be used. Having the list hosted by Rootsweb will automatically make it easier to bring other Wamsley researchers "out of the woodwork" too, as there are some automatic announcements made on several lists about new surname lists. With the way Wanda has been doing it, it's a word of mouth way that probably will not reach nearly as many people. Disadvantages? None that I know of. Rootsweb has some built in filters so that web-crawling "robots" can't get to the archives to harvest email addresses for junk mail (called spam). That seems to be the only concern that most people have about having an archive available. When I originally suggested this to Wanda, we had a lot of dialog about it. Though she plans to continue Wamsleyweb for now, I know from experience that the work load on her will only increase, and that's why I proposed this alternative. Better now than later so that the archives are "complete". If anybody has any questions that I haven't answered, please feel free to ask. If you absolutely do not want to be subscribed to the new listserv (that's what this type thing is called), then let me know. I'm not trying to take away "leadership" from Wanda, and as she said to me "Leadership or being in charge of this is not important to me". However, we should all be thankful to her for taking the inititive 20+ issues ago for getting the thing started, and I for one will still think of her as the leader. Remember, send to the Wamsley-L@rootsweb.com address, and if you wish to cc to Wanda, that's ok, but she *is* on the list so will get the message in any case; she'll just get two copies if you cc her. PS. my Wamsley is William b.1785 m1) Nancy Bussell m2) Fanny Madby and my info was in issue # 21. --        Kathryn Rhinehart Bassett (Pasadena CA)              kathryn.bassett@switchboard.net         "genealogy is my bag" "GH is my soap"     http://pw2.netcom.com/~kathrynb/kathryn.htm