(Cynthia here, making Feet-in-Mouth Notes) Armed with the given & SIMMONS Surname of the *Wife* of my Sam CLAYTON, and two conflicting Wisconsin death certificates of my great-great grandmother & her brother both born in the early 1800s in NC (!), which named THEIR MUTUAL FATHER as being born both in "Virginia" (which is large when no County is named); and also as being born in "North Carolina" which he wasn't....I am eternally grateful to the Binns for early on providing the indexing & search means for me to nail down Surry & Isle of Wight Counties, ultimately leading me to Southampton just prior to their short stay in NC as the seat of the SIMMONS/SYMONDS in the earlier times - so I had a clue which county resources online upon which to concentrate my Deed& Will finding efforts. Family research & myths aside, there was nothing so valuable to me as seeing the actual image on the website, the actual family names right there before my very eyes along with neighbors who ultimately became fellow travelers on the roundabout trek West.. I made a deathbed promise to my beloved grandmother whose own mother had died when she was 8 days old and was not spoken of again when her father remarried, to "find her missing family". I had little to go on but whispered family stories Gram half remembered overhearing from her older siblings.... I needed all the help I could find... I have almost, *almost* concluded that like lending money, I need to look at anything I might set out on the Internet as *gifted* - as in *Tossed to The Wind*. Make my best effort & accept that it's out of my hands once I hit SEND. Gulp. Squirming here, because I have not yet translated this Glorious Conclusion into Action. And I was reminded again reading Paul's comment, "What most fail to realize is that less than 40% of all the records we MIGHT one day want to use have been abstracted or otherwise made available to researchers, and of that 40%, less than 30% is yet available on the net. So it is that if we read EVERYTHING on the net, we would have viewed something in the neighborhood of 12% of what is out there." I don't make my living in genealogy. Nor am I even writing a book nor a paper, well other than this current novelette by email. And I've gotten burnt too, for one thing - finding my personal little rootsweb gedcom recycled with appendages of supposed descendants not remotely within the parameters of human fertility, nor of similar national origins... At present, I am sitting on a number of completed 1850 Census transcriptions I've done up which I find indispensable in my own personal research and am certain would be a welcome addition to the general genealogical database of their particular county websites, but....... First of all, even though whatever I am doing is not for profit, in the context of this discussion I realize now I *stole* the original census images I've painstakingly transcribed, by way of my paid ancestry.com subscription... yes? And then, I didn't like the official "GenWeb Census Format" that extends data beyond the computer screen 'n formatted my own transcriptions for easy use that DO fit the screen. Comparing some completely insensible surnames with local marriage license lists, early land records, later census listings, bios, and in a few cases personal knowledge, I have typed up the entries with recognizable (& computer searchable) spellings, sometimes disregarding the enumerator's artfully scripted but phonetic concoctions. (I don't always like that when "other people" transcribe things adding their own [unbracketed] conclusions...even if they DO know for absolutely sure...) You see? Yet mispellings aren't computer findable and I was first of all doing this for my own personal use. It's a horrible job. "Errors" are inevitable. If the enumerator hasn't gone 'n made 'em, (miswritten, misunderstood, mispelled, misplaced, misnumbered)...I can certainly misread the blurry scribblings myself. Short of that, I am still wondering if one Illinois head of household enumerated as, "SIMMONS, Medad", was somewhere out in the back-forty the day the census-taker stopped by the farmhouse. Nevermind, but then you know what I am getting at. And once you submit any of these things "to expand the accessible databases online", are you consigning yourself to make endless updates if you hear from each and every descendant who knows for sure a child's age was wrong or given name spelled otherwise? In the average 1850 county census with say 1200 dwellings consisting of one to 21 dwellers therein, attempting to satisfy every researcher's concerns could amount to a fulltime nightmare. There's a lot of re-thinking, reshuffling, (work and forgiving) to be done if we hope someday to be able to trace our families with a click of the mouse. Back in 1996 when I first connected to the internet there was next to nothing online, very very little in the way of raw genealogical data. Even though now the amount of material is overwhelming, yet not too long ago I myself sent a whining plea to the Powers That Be begging that it be suggested to the hundreds of county genweb volunteers they upload at least a Township Map of their counties - one of those with the 1-36 sections of each within their boundaries would be nice....& available to scan from their local libraries but ordinarily not available to researchers in other counties much less in other States - so we can orient ourselves to the data they offer, yadda yadda...well you know, gratitude for what DOES exist online doesn't always override my frustration. Now in 2004, there is however, HOPE !!! Hope that some kind soul in some corner of the universe will maybe even inadvertantly include that missing link we've been desparately seeking in their contribution and some fine morning we will put the surname in again and voila! it will google right up... We've had enlightening, if not absolutely conclusive discussion on conflicting aspects of "Passing on our research once we pass on"; and I'm thinking it timely, if not totally out of line, to discuss "fearlessly passing it on now" . To increase the online database for each other and future generations of researchers. Yes there are pitfalls. And surprising consequences. Some pretty unpleasant ones. But I keep feeling I ought to submit the stuff I've worked so hard on if it only helps just one person, like I've been helped. Cynthia, shutting up now at long last; permanently, folding up her portable podium; going back to sulking over things. Well no wait a minute. PS, Steve?: there was a lot, A LOT, of email that arrived in my mailbox yesterday, also mourning the loss of your website; which I see today now receiving my digest, wasn't sent in to the whole list. While it's absolutely out-of-line for me to ask you to reconsider when I can't even get myself to put my dopey little personal gedcom back online - well you know, I'm hoping you'll reconsider anyway. . ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-roots.html