Dear Cousins on the List: There are several ongoing projects at usgenweb.com Volunteers are busy copying records for inclusion, and you can view the various pages at http://usgenweb.com/projects/projects.html One of the most ambitious and helpful is the census project. A company has donated the digital copies and many counties and years, are now in the process of being transcribed. You can view what ones are finished, underway, or available for someone to transcribe. If you can volunteer your time to any of these projects, it would be a wonderful undertaking. http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/census/ For those of you who have SW Virginia or NW North Carolina (and further on south) ancestry, you may be very interested in the wonderful website, Cherokee by Blood. This site has recently added an instruction to the Guion Miller Roll, which is the index to applications for enrollment. This site is part of the Tennessee usgenweb, and is maintained by Jerry Wright Jordan, who has done a tremendous service for searchers of Indian ancestry. Among others, there are many Pennington names -- I have not yet had time to check for other names. These rolls contain names of applicants; not all were enrolled. The application was given a number (of course!) and copies can be obtained from the National Archives. When searching any records like these, particularly in census records, remember to check for variant spellings. With finding aids such as the Guion Miller Rolls, most variant spellings will appear close together, but by checking really off the wall variants, i.e., Bennington, Denington, Rennington, etc., for Pennington, I have found names that would have otherwise been lost forever. This is much easier to do on a list, finding aid, or index than it is to do in a search engine where you must perform individual searches for each variant. I will be putting up Native American page at American Crossroads, and will be adding other names to the Pemberton, Pendleton, Penington, Pennington, Perry, Perdue, Perdew, Perkins names I have copied. http://www.tngenweb.org/cherokee_by_blood/miller.htm Once you have gotten through the instructions given at Cherokee by Blood you are ready to go to NAIL, which is the National Archives (NARA) Archival Information Locator. NAIL also contains information about other NARA holdings. If you have no Indian ancestry, or interest it it, you may still want to visit NAIL http://www.nara.gov/nara/nail.html Love, Your Cousin, Carolyn Carolyn McDaniel cmacdee@teleport.com ========================================= --- Visit American Crossroads --- http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads