Jim,

I'm sure you have your reasons, and the volume of input to this forum over the last few weeks is probably the main one you are thinking of breaking the MO irregulars out of the MO regulars, but I am against it. It is my experience that many of the people who inquire about ancestors in the MO Civil War may not know great, great granddad was a regular or irregulur Confederate. Further, many regular southern soldiers fought in both modes at various times during the war. Likewise, many Union units faced guerrillas at some times and southern regulars at others. People would get lost or confused, and that is the reason they come to your wonderful forum in the first place. I would rather not see any more hurdles placed in their path.

A case in point is the lady on the Kansas in the Civil War Message Board who pitched her inquiry in on top of a Kansas query a few days ago because the previous message happened to mention Missouri. Her query is about Confederate Colonel John T. Coffee of Dade County, MO, which would elicit lots of interest in this forum, especially since she is kin to him. She is asking about an event that took place in early September 1864 in Howell County in south-central Missouri, which is nowhere near Kansas. I tried to tactly mention she may do better repeating her questions on this forum, but she has not communicated further on either website. Sometimes we forget that there are some who feel intimidated with entering a query about a family member on a public forum on the chance that someone will show disrespect.

One reason I didn't like the older Rootsweb forums is that well-meaning inquirers would place their query with Civil War matters in a specific county website or on one of their many other forums, and the people with Civil War interest would have a hard time finding it. Not everybody realizes that Rootsweb has a MO-CW forum, and it pales in comparison with this one.

I would rather see everybody stick their questions in one forum and let the repliers sort them out. We just never know where some of these questions will lead. If we split them, we may dilute the available replies.

Bruce Nichols