I believe that all the early Free Republic threads were deleated as part of the settlememt of a lawsuit by the LA Times and WaPo.
I first found FR sometime in mid-1997. Lurked for awhile and first joined up around late 1997 or early 1998. I've always used the same screen name here. For some reason I never did figure out, my early registration kept getting reset every now and again, and I'd have to re-register with a different password. I finally "stuck" sometime in 1999. I don't think everyone of the earliest FR registrants had this experience, though.