Carlisle wrote: . . . I have a question though. I have been viewing and searching through parish records for the last couple of years of one particular town and I was wondering, what is the reliability of information found in the parish records versus the information found in the "Ortsfamilienbuch" (local family book)? Me: As Ted mentioned, someone goes through the parish books (and civil records in some cases?) and attempts to connect all of the people into family groups. Compare this to LDS extraction: Each birth is extracted but kept as a separate record. In other words, there is no attempt to show that one baby is related to the same parents' next baby. Extracted records are very literal, no interpretation, and therefore very accurate for what they are. Since you can search these records in the IGI, it's more or less an index of that villages residents over a period of time. It's left to the researcher (us) to combine the two babies into one family with the parents. The Ortsfamilienbuch/Ortssippenbuch author has a broader mission, speaks the language of the records, and in most cases has local knowledge. His mission is to transcribe and interpret. He has to decide if Johannes Georg Mayer who was christened in 1712 is the same as Juerg Meier who married Marie Veronica Dietz in 1735. And are Georg and Freni Meir the same couple in the birth entry as parents of Johann Conrad in 1737? Then is Hans Juerg and Marie Veronica Meyer's baby Johann Gustav, born in 1740, the brother of Conrad? If you think I'm exagerating, here is an example that drove me and the OSB author bonkers. Man named A B Y married a woman named C D Z. Soon a child was listed with parents B and D Y. A year later, another child was born to B and D E Y. Then to A B and C E Y. Then to A and E Y. And on for about ten births. It always looked like the same man but the woman who bore his children used a combination of three given names that was rarely the same combination but that overlapped enough to make one wonder if it was one or two women. That made us wonder if there were two women, were there two men? Or maybe the first died and he married again a woman with the name C E X or D E X. We couldn't resolve it using that assumption. We counted months between babies. They were mostly 10 to 15 months apart and never less than 9 1/2 months so it was plausible that it was one very fertile and robust female. I read about polygamy in the time frame and found it was allowed in some cases during that time because of the population problem. Priests were also allow to marry for a decade or two. We couldn't find any evidence that a second marriage had taken place but we knew it could have taken place in a nearby village. The OSB author and I did know of each other's work until after we both had made our own conclusions. I think I spent much more time on it because they were my wife's ancestor and I was researching a fraction of the people in the village over a few decades. He had the whole population and centuries to cover. He took a wild *** guess and I entered the data in two ways--as one family with the man marrying once and also marrying twice after the first wife died. I footnoted the option of two distinct couples and also one man married to two women at the same time. (I also discussed the issue with the top German resercher at the FHL and with family members active in research on this line.) So you can see my first example is not an exageration. I had spent three years going back and forth through eight decades of the parish books (on permanent loan at my local FHC) for this same place, each time finding more. I came to the end of a pedigree chart and had two of the eight people filled out on the right side of the chart and no line pushed to the next page/chart. I had about two/thirds of the lines on the page completed (along with all of their children, of course) and I knew a great deal about their lives and professions etc. I think I had about 150 names. Then I went to Germany and spent a week in that town. On the second day I was introduced to a man workding on an OSB (the man in the example above). He let me download what he had completed by then which was well past the time my wife's ancestors had left the town for America. With his data, I was able to complete the pedigree chart so I got another 75 people including the six lines at the right of the chart. I mention this to show how much more he was able to do than I was, because of his language and local knowledge. But, I found things he hadn't been able to do, because they were not in his mission. For example, a family had two girls that, because of overlapping names, I thought was one person. Later, I found the family had spent time in the overlord's nearby town tending the later's business and there I found the birth of one of the girls which made it obvious they were two persons, not one. I document five of six things I thought he had gotten wrong with regards to my wife's line which he as able to correct and/or include in his work. I was grateful and amazed at what a wealth of knowledge he supplied to my research but also aware that he was not infallible. I did check all the names in my wife's line that I got from his draft against the parish book microfilms I had so I could be satisfied that his interpretation was good. This also allowed by to read the entries and glean information you can't get in an OSB and make my own interpretations since I wanted to get to the next generations on as many lines as possible. The OSB author pointed me to a government employee who was an expert in late 16th century immigration to the area. The official took one look at my chart and could tell many of them had come from Switzerland (because of thei given and ruf names and in some cases their surnames). He showed me how to find where those names might have come from in Switzerland. I joined the Swiss List which is almost as good as this list, just smaller, and I've been able to push a few lines back another century. I've got more work to do on these and feel confident I'll get more lines back more generations. OSB's are a treasure trove but they are still only a secondary source. Use them to help you get the most out of your parish book films. Let the OSB teach you how to recognize your surnames and as a check on your work. Then take it a step further and check the author's work. It took me six hours to read my first paragraph entry in that parish book and I had four years of German under my belt. The next took only half and hour, then 15 minutes, then five. Then the scribe changed but I never had to go back to more than half an hour. Remember that no one cares as much about your ancestral line as you do even if the OSB author is passionate about his/her work and is much better equiped to dig through the old records than you are. It's the same, IMHO, with hiring a researcher. He/she may be able to get you where you couldn't go on your own but you need to take the time to see if he/she got it right in every case. Not because the researcher might be trying to cheat you, but because you do this out of love for your family and/or love for the hobby/idea of getting each detail correct. And you want to establish a solid platform for pushing the line even further. Gotta go, Paul