I show below the substance of a message I received from Sue Mackay, a name anyone also on the Glamlist will be familiar with . Apart from telling us about her breakthrough and making very good points about searching list archives and mail subject lines, Sue also gives me the excuse to 'bang the drum' about the 'Not everyone knows this' [NEKT] sections of my Help Page. There is almost 2mb of text material on the NEKT pages, made up of interesting material posted to the lists over the last few years, or what I have extracted from local history books direct. The gateway page is http://home.clara.net/tirbach/HelpPagepearls.html Despite what Sue says, please don't all immediately unsubscribe and use the list archives instead, no listers = no list messages = no archives :-) Thanks for sharing with us Sue ! ############# I am not a subscriber to the Dyfed or Pembrokeshire lists, but I have had considerable success recently in doing some research for cousins in Texas without having to leave my desk. The starting point for this success was an e-mail sent to the Dyfed list by Mary Bryceland in 2000 which Gareth posted on the 'Not Everyone Knows This' section of his Help Page. My cousins are descended from Stephen Langston and Maria Rotch. I am connected to them through another line, but I offered to find out what I could about their Rotch/Langston forebears. There was a well known Quaker whaling family called Rotch in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and family legend said they were connected to this family, yet family papers said that Maria Rotch had been born in Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, the daughter of Benjamin Rotch and Elizabeth Barker. I typed Rotch and Milford Haven into a search engine, and up came Gareth's NEKT page with a piece about the whaling industry in Milford Haven and the Quakers who came from Nantucket, including a William Rotch. This was the link I needed, which started me off on a fascinating internet search trail. William Rotch turned out to be Benjamin's father and Maria's grandfather, and I was able to tap into a wealth of material on the net about the Rotches from Nantucket. I am very grateful to Gareth for NEKT, but I have since discovered another route which would have achieved the same result. Every message sent to a rootsweb mailing list goes in to the rootsweb archives. If you go to http://lists.rootsweb.com/ and click on Wales, then Dyfed, it will bring up the page http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/intl/WLS/DYFED.html Scroll down and click on Search the Dyfed Archives, then type in the word Rotch with 2000 ticked and Bingo!! Up comes Mary Bryceland's e-mail about whaling in Pembrokeshire. If you click Browse the Archives you will get a list of all the subject lines, but sadly these are not always what they seem. Do make sure you have the address of the list in your e-mail address book. A lot of listers simply find the last e-mail on their machine that came in from the list and hit the Reply button, without changing the Subject Line. So, for example, someone might get terribly excited while browsing the archives to find one entitled 'Whaling in Pembrokeshire' only to open it and find it said 'Can anyone help me find John Jones?' When you find an e-mail in the Archives you can reply directly to the individual, so you don't actually need to subscribe to the list if you haven't got huge interests in the area. It is therefore possible to search the archives for several counties without having the tremendous volume of e-mail that subscribing to all those lists would entail. When I realised that Stephen Langston and Maria Rotch's daughter had been born in Sheffield, I typed Langston into the Yorkshire rootsweb search. I found an e-mail written two years ago by a lady in Australia who had transcribed the 1840 trade directory for Bridlington and copied the whole thing to the list in 5 e-mails, and there was 'Rev.Stephen Langston, the Promenade Bridlington (also Sheffield)' Until then I had no idea he had ever been near Bridlington, so if I had simply used Browse the Archives I probably wouldn't have opened an e-mail called Bridlington Part 2!!! I have my internet 'Home' page set as http://www.genfair.com/home.htm This is part of the Online Family History Fair, useful in itself, but this particular page has a Google Search Facility and links to the Top 10 Genealogical Sites for UK research. By judicious use of e-mail, Google Advanced Search and the IGI on line I have, in the space of a week, been able to get the Rotch family back to 1704 and the Langstons back to 1765 without really going out of the study.There is a wealth of material out there. Go forth and find it! Sue Mackay Glamorgan FHS sue.mackay@virgin.net Gareth List Administrator for Dyfed, CGN & PEM. tirbach@clara.co.uk Lookup Exchange http://home.clara.net/tirbach/lookup.html Help Page http://home.clara.net/tirbach/hicks.html