In a message dated 04/15/2000 9:31:33 AM Central Daylight Time, 4roberts@cei.net writes: << I was wondering what is Goodspeed? Where would I find it? >> Goodspeed is; "Goodspeed Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas". Published, 1890, new material added in 1978. The earlier edition was one large volume with an index of names in an accompaning thin booklet. The later printings have added some new material and is in a set of several volumes, about six volumes in number, with indices of names in the back of the volumes. The text book is in most Arkansas libraries and I would assume all large libraries which have material on Arkansas families would have it. I have found the material to be accurate but may tend to omit some things which should have been put into it. For instance, Goodspeed lists twin girls in the family of Virgil and Sallie Wood, in addition to 6 other children. The twins' names were, Okla and Homa! The Wood family disappeared from all Hempstead County, AR., records after the 1880 census; the twins were not in that census or any Arkansas census . After wondering why they would name their twins, Okla and Homa and living in Arkansas, I finally found the family in Kay County Oklahoma! Okla and Homa were born AFTER the family moved to Oklahoma. Goodspeed should have entered that little fact and saved me 4 years of searching for the why of the names and where the family had moved. Virgil A Wood was a physician in southern Arkansas and after searching for four years where Virgil and his family had disappeared, a friend suggested I search medical records. The Journal of the American Medical Association at the library of the UAMS in Little Rock, says he was practicing medicine in Blackwell OK in 1885. So don't expect many details to be found in Goodspeeds text book that should have been there. However, it is a good reference book concerning families which lived in Southern Arkansas. If genealogy was an easy and "cut and dried" hobby, I suppose it would not hold any attraction for us. Ray, in Southern Arkansas