I started a post with a picture at the top.

On the excerpt page (when I click to see a list of stories for this month/year) the caption of the picture displays (not the image, just the caption), followed by a portion of the text of the post. I don't know if this a theme issue or Wordpress issue but the bottom line is that I don't want the caption to display there. I either want the text of the post or the picture and the text of the post.

Any suggestions?

You may need to use the Featured Image function and/or add <img> to "Don't Strip These Tags" in the theme options. Not sure of the specifics but you can play with those two ideas to see what works.

Setting Featured Image to the image I'm using for that post did change the display of the excerpt such that there is now a picture there. So that is an improvement. Thanks

At least the caption now makes sense because there is an image next to it but the caption is not really visually associated with the image. It is just displayed as though it is another paragraph of the post.

I don't know why that is happening.

excerpts, by default, strip ALL HTML from a post, that is what makes it an excerpt. Now the length of an excerpt is 55 by default (you can make it bigger) and that is words. Words are anything seperated by spaces and this includes the parts of HTML statements

bottom line, if you want an excerpt to look a certian way, yse the manual excerpt portion of the post editor and craft it the way you want. A manual excerpt always takes presidnece.

Thank you. Manual excerpt solved the problem. I did not even know about that feature. I had to change the screen options to see that.

Really, thanks again!