Thanks Carolyn.  I followed a somwhat similar path, though I think if I had the censuses available when I started mining, I might have used those for the scaffolding.   My primary village is Hatten, and it has un-indexed Latin records for most of the 1700s, then un-indexed German with the Republican calendar, then French with handy TDs for the rest of the 1800s.   My biggest problem is the German period.  I can work my through Latin (mostly, with help from folks here) and do well in the later French period (which has pre-printed forms that help a lot), but I have big holes in my research because the German records just stump me completely.