Dear Barbara,

Thank you for your feedback. There are a few ways to include a reply in messages:

Replying via your email to an individual message (i.e. not a digest): It depends on the setting within your email client. When clicking "reply" if your email client automatically includes the previous message, it will do so within this Discussion Group as well. If it does not, you can adjust your settings, or copy+paste the message manually. If you need help, please email support@..., include which email client you use, and we will do our best to help.

Replying via your email to a message within a digest: Beneath the message you are interested in replying to, there are the following options:

1. View/Reply Online: If you click on View/Reply Online that will allow you to use the online message editor, and there is an option to include all/some of the message in your reply (see below).
2. Reply To Group: If you click Reply to Group, you will open a new email in your email client, and you would have to copy+paste the message in order to include it. Note: The nice part of this platform is that you can easily view the entire thread of a conversation/topic by clicking: View Topic > View All Messages in Topic.  

Replying via the Web Forum (groups.JewishGen.org): There are two ways to do this:

1. Using the online message editor, you can quote the entire message by clicking the far-left icon on the menu bar in the editor ("Quote Whole Post"). See the arrows in the screen-shot below.
2. You can highlight a portion of the message before you hit the Reply button, and that section of the message will be quoted.

I hope this was helpful. Thank you again. We will strive to continuously improve this new platform, making it as user-friendly as possible, and we greatly appreciate your feedback.
Avraham