Happy New Year

["John S. Quarterman" <jsq@matrix.net>]

Happy New Year,

And happy birthday to Jenny Coster.
(It's still 1 Jan here in Austin, but it's 2 Jan in NZ.)

The Sinclair Discussion List and its associated Digest currently
has 218 members.  It's run in the range of 200 to 220 for a couple
of years now.

Somebody was asking me whether there was a sudden surge in list
membership to account for the recent swell of good feeling exhibited
on the list.  Nope.  It appears that some recent postings have simply
struck a chord.

A few weeks ago also marked the beginning of the third year of this list,
which started on 18 December 1997.

Numerous people have contributed to this list from its inception,
starting with the late Pete Cummings.  I would name some of the rest
of them, but I fear to either omit some of them or to name some of
them in the same sentence, and in either case they might fight and I
would thus spoil this new era of good feeling. :-)

I will note some of the spinoffs or additions to this list, plus some
of the numerous efforts that have used this list in some way:

 * the guestbook provided by Paul Sinclair.
 * the copious text and pictures contributed to the companion
	web pages, www.mids.org/sinclair/, by far too many
	people to list, but among whom I have to mention
	Niven Sinclair, Rory Sinclair, and Tim Wallace-Murphy.
 * Chief Malcolm Caithness' leadership.
 * the writeup about plain text email by Margaret (milamba).
 * Karen Matheson's research about the Sinclairs of Argyll
 * the genealogy list organized by Gary M. Sinclair.
 * Lena Lofstrom's genealogy database.
 * Rebecca Sanford, Toni Sinclair, and Christine Carver's research
	about Argyll Sinclairs.
 * Mary Selver's Clan Sinclair U.S.A. web pages
 * the dates and other text and pictures contributed by P. Sinclair,
	aka labehotierre@wanadoo.fr and privateers@privateers.org.
 * Laurel Fechner's history web pages.
 * the invaluable assistance of Gary M. Sinclair
   in running this discussion list.

Hm.  Looks like I listed a lot of names anyway, and left many more out.
Oh well.  I'm sure we'll survive.

And no, I haven't forgotten Neil Sinclair and Rob Cohn and all the
others whose contributions may not fit as neatly in a list as the
above, but are nonetheless equally as valuable.

I cannot possibly list you all.  Well, except by listing all your messages:
	http://www.mids.org/sinclair/archive/

Over to you, the members.

John S. Quarterman <jsq@matrix.net>
[ This is the Sinclair family discussion list, sinclair@mids.org
[ To get off or on the list, see http://www.mids.org/sinclair/list.html