Hi Earl, I was just thinking that if my Hessian's name could have been changed so much, maybe yours could have been too. I'd try actually viewing the census in the areas you think he was in. I do know that Ancestry.com's and Genealogy.com's indexes have major errors in the transcriptions of the indexes. One example is in my site at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~bonsteinandgilpin/hstry/btyhist.htm This is an extract from my site.... This is from Ray Beaty PHD.. the Beatty project founder... A related research problem has emerged in the last few years. As we now have indexes for just about every available U.S. Census year we are running into the problem created by indexing errors. Many of the original census data pages are difficult to read because of the census recorder's difficult handwriting or the quality of the microfilm. I have been working with the Ancestry.com and the Genealogy.com indexes and have found several errors in the past couple of weeks. For example, Donna Van Zandt and I were looking for the 1870 data on a Lewis Beatty (Lineage 1), having the data for all the other census years on him. He is not listed in the Genealogy.com 1870 index under the normal variations (Baty, Baity, Batey, Beatie, Beattie, Beatty, Beaty, Beattey, Betty etc.). Donna found him the hard way by going to the county and township he lived in 1860 and searched the 1870 residents until she found him. When she sent me the data I wondered how Genealogy.com had missed him, so I pulled up the 1870 image which looked like it could have been interpreted as BENTLY. When I went back to the Genealogy.com index I then found him....listed as LEWIS BENTTZ.! A spelling variation I would never have thought to check! So....Researchers beware....like DAR records, family bibles, county (vanity) histories, etc., these new indexes are not without errors! Nelda Nelda L. Percival nee Gilpin, IBSSG Beatty #005 & #10; Graves #231 & #105 http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~bonsteinandgilpin/ http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~gillock/ http://www.doodleartgraphics.com/