Larry, If you get 2,000 hits it means that there are more than that in the book because 2,000 is the maximum it will display and I don't know of any way to see the hits after the 2,000 max. The results indicate you got 2,713 private (non-commercial) hits for Hollmann. It looks like all of the first 2,000 were spelled Hollmann but there are other spellings you'll have to get at another way. See comments on Geogen below. BTW, you can sort the list on the website by clicking the heading of the column you wish to sort by. I also gave you the Geogen site ( http://christoph.stoepel.net/geogen/en/Default.aspx ) which shows relative and absolute mapping for all 2,900+ entries which includes the commercial ones. You'll see that the name is widely distributed but that there are significant concentrations in the modern German provinces of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony. I generally don't consider a concentration, in absolute terms, in Berlin to be significant because it's a very large city and has attracted many there over the years so modern phonebook entries in Berlin are not usually an indication of family name origin. You have to guess at the other spellings to see the results. In addition to Hollmann, I got hits for Holman and Holmann. Family history research is often iterative. You learn a little here and a little there. Then you take back what you learned there and apply it here and maybe learn more here than you knew without the information from there. Confused? Maybe from using the phone book, you learned that you should be expanding your search for Holman to include Hollmann and Holmann. Maybe you learned that statistically the Hollmanns came from the central western edge of Germany. With so many hits for Hollmann, I would see if there are any cities or villages in Germany by postal code with over 50 listings. I wouldn't rent those films but I would keep them in mind as I searched for other information. What else do you know? Wife's maiden name? Religion? Trade? Ship? Who else came on the ship? Did he come as a redemptioner (see my article in Wikipedia on redemptioners at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redemptioner) or paid passage ahead of time? Keep adding the details and sometime you could get a cross reference. Look in large databases such as www.familysearch.org and its record search pilot at http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#p=0, shipping/arrival databases, etc. Regards, Paul