Hello Dick and Dick's e-readers!

I would like to thank each of you for helping us out down here in Houston. Your calls and e-mails were very useful to our cause and very well appreciated.

I have written a genealogical column in the Houston Chronicle since May 1994. When the Chronicle changed format in September some of the managers did not feel there was enough interest to warrant a weekly genealogical column even though the column had run for eight years. It had been in a section of the newspaper that only went to people who live in the Houston Metropolitan area. I do not know the circulation of the Chronicle, but we have a population of slightly over 4 million.

I think the newspaper management was quite surprised at the response of the genealogical community. Charlie Gardes of the Houston Genealogical Forum created a website as an e-mail launching pad for directing everyone to the Chronicle's Reader Representative. A number of people in the Houston and Southeast Texas area organized and got genealogists from their organizations to call or e-mail the Reader Rep.

In addition, Dick Eastman kindly let his readers know about the problem, and you came to bat for us as well. I expect the managers at the Chronicle were really scratching their heads wondering how a column published only in Houston could generate mail and calls from all over Texas and all or most of the states of the United States and a couple foreign countries.

While I do not know how many, or who, wrote or called, I do know the Chronicle was impressed enough to call and ask me to continue writing the column in their new section, Weekend Living. Weekend Living is published weekly and goes out as a regular part of the Chronicle. For the past two weeks they have had a very nice promo for the column on the front page of the section.

For those of you who would like to read the column, it is published each Saturday in the Weekend Living section of the Houston Chronicle. Each week the current column appears on the Chronicle deaths page at www.houstonchronicle.com/deaths. Just scroll down and click on the link for Mic Barnette/Your Family Tree. There is an archive of older columns which ended 31 December 2001 at www.geocities.com/barnette_geo. When the URL for the columns archives ran in Dick's column, the website was taken down by Geocities-Yahoo due to too many hits. I plan on getting another website with more space and upload all 2002 columns sometime in the near future.

Again, Thanks to all of you.

Mic

To discuss this story further on the message board for newsletter readers, go to www.RootsForum.com and click on "Message Board."