Dear Cousins, I have added an 1820 Jefferson County Census Study to the website, using Beej's ancestor George Burton as the focus. http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads/INJeff/beej.html It has produced some interesting insights into indexing and name changes. Although it is almost impossible to find ancestors in populous areas without indexes, they are notoriously inaccurate portrayals of who is actually on the census. You will be amazed to discover so many errors and omissions on just the 1820 census page for George Burton. I am sure it is illustrative of your own census difficulties. Relying on indexes of one surname is certainly the reason many researchers believe they have come to a dead end in their ancestral quests. The ancestors are there, we just don't realize how the census taker identified them, and then, recently, how the transcribers and indexers identified them. Some surnames have so many variants, if you are using internet databases as a resource for the census, it is simply impossibly to search by surname. The search engines will not accommodate the variants. I have given an example here for the listing I found for Burnham, in which 15 more spellings were turned up in just one township. This brings up another aspect of census analysis. It has long seemed almost useless to merely copy one surname and make a list of it, although I did this religiously as a beginning researcher, and I'm sure all of you did too if you have done any census work at all. When the first census indexes began coming out, I copied pages of single surnames and avidly copied down the census information as I was able to look them up on the census. Now years and years later, I am sorry to look back on them and find I would have learned so much more about my family if I had understood the importance of kinship families all around them. I lived in Maryland then and would drive into Washington D. C. to the National Archives to examine the census. Now I am going back over many lost backcountry routes and re-examining census images online at Ancestry.com. For Beej's ancestor, I incorporated these online census images from Ancestry.com, still one of the best databases there, along with the AIS (Accelerated Indexing System), which is a heads of household index for the 1790 census as well as most of the 19th century census listings. The AIS is a wonderful tool, although for some reason Ancestry is no longer making it as readily available as they formerly did. Also, the Burtons migrated from Kentucky to Indiana, and the formerly excellent Ancestry database from Williard Rouse Jillson's "Kentucky Land Grants" should be able to be utilized with terrific results in Beej's search. However, Ancestry has re-formatted most of their most useful databases, adding a "I am related" and "Comments," after each entry, which makes it impossible to simply copy by outlining the information from the page with the mouse and pasting it into your word processor so that it can be compared with other regional entries, for instance the other land owners along a watercourse. Had I enough time, I would be adding plenty of comments to these entries, but there are simply too many to tell Ancestry what I think of this practice. Computer and internet genealogy is supposed to make research easier rather than complicate it, especially when you're paying for the services, which is the case at Ancestry. Also annoying at Ancestry, while I'm ranting, is the offensive advertising which now permeates their pages -- doubly annoying for a subscription service. On the other hand, the US GenWeb pages are adding great features all the time. Now there are biographies from the old 19th century County Histories at many more County pages. And local libraries and archives are getting on the bandwagon too and improving their regional offerings. A wonderful example of this is the Historic Pittsburgh site which has a grand collection of e-texts reflecting the role western Pennsylvania played in the expansion all along the frontier. These are searchable and have many maps and illustrations included in each. http://digital.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/pitttext-idx.pl?type=browse I have reformatted the Potomac Perimeter page, and hope you find it more readable and useful. I'm working over many of the pages to correct poor links and page sizes, and am still plugging away with the Master Index. Bear with me -- we'll get there! http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads/Potomac/potomac.html Love, Your Cousin, Carolyn