Steve Hayes <hayesstw@telkomsa.net> wrote: >>But how far away does "outside" mean? The next parish? The next county? And >>how long is 'normally lived"? I have ag labs in my databases who seemed to >>specialise in having each of their large number of kids in a new parish.... > >The Cambridge strays project seem to regard it as meaning "out of county" >which, here in South Africa, and in Canada, one might regard as "out of >province, and in Oz and the US they might regard as "out of state" and so on >for other places. The US census reported that some 40 million people in the US moved during 2005-2006, 20% to a different county, 14% to a different state, and 3% to a different country (into the US from abroad). Using the state level or higher, that is 7 million "strays" a year. Not a small number. http://progressiverealtync.blogspot.com/2007/10/us-census-bureau-releases-statistics-on.html Obviously the population was lower 100 years ago, but I suspect that the percentage rates were somewhat higher. But since many of those relocations were entire families, simply looking the names of the family members up on the census will find them even in another state. That is why I wouldn't consider people living with their families to necessarily be "strays" of the sort needing a special database (though perhaps if they are newly married and have changed states, that is significant). It is the people NOT living with their families that are hard to find, especially if the name is a common one. That is just relocations - in this country, people often go to a neighboring state (or to Las Vegas or some other resort) to get married, though they don't actually relocate. Vegas's county has some 120,000 marriages per year, with a population just under 2 million, about 3 times that of the total population of Nevada 30 years ago. By the above definition, most people in Nevada are strays, since they weren't born in Nevada, and most marriages in Vegas are strays. lojbab --- Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist lojbab@lojban.org Lojban language www.lojban.org