At 01:35 PM 6/11/02 -0400, you wrote: >(Marengo, Clarke border) is not one of the counties listed as home >counties for soldiers in that company. Am I barking up a potentially >wrong tree or is there a chance the soldier named >on the muster lists IS the same as my g-g-gpa? It may be that it's another man with the exact same name! I once ran into a woman who had an ancestor who had the exact same name as my great-great grandfather, and her ancestor had a son with the exact same name as a son of my great-great grandfather, but they were not, by other evidence, the same people. Sometimes it does get weird. Another possibility is that the soldier mentioned IS your ancestor, but you're thrown off because the county lines in question have shifted and changed in some way over time. Check that out in one of the many guidebooks available, one of which is The Handy Book for Genealogists. It has a section for every state which lays out the ways county lines have shifted when, for instance, a couple of small counties were formed out of one big one. Your public library or a local genealogical society will probably have that and other books. Another book for lots of information on how and where to do genealogy research, including finding out about shifting county lines, is The Source: a Guidebook of American Genealogy. It may be that your ancestor was born in the county when it was part of the one mentioned in your source, but that the part in which his birthplace lies later split off and became another county. Good luck. Karen Rhodes