Velma thanks for your latest efforts and posting your results. Chasing down any Birdwells in England is a brilliant idea. Perhaps that will provide our long lost key one of these days. Finding the link back to England or Europe will probably take all of our collective brain power and efforts. By the way, I have a new American lead I will post later this week but in light of these postings it would be most appropriate to review this other material first. It would be great fun if we could connect our line to the Henry Birdwell you noted. The IGI shows what appears to be four consecutive generations from his 1630 marriage to beyond 1700. If it happened to work out that our Birdwell line tied back to him we would have a huge jump on an English lineage. OK now folks don’t roll your eyes, there is no harm in wishful thinking. Of course there is no known link to Henry Birdwell’s family. Yet if it exists maybe we can find it. A gentleman in England saw a query I posted in 1998. He is not related to the Birdwell family but was kind enough to look up a few more Bedfordshire records on that Henry Birdwell family and email them to me. He did find some additional dates (primarily death records). So if there is interest, when I have some spare time I’ll put those together with the already known IGI records and post them to the Birdwell List. What his efforts do prove is that more records exist than have been put out on those IGI files ! So perhaps our proof is still waiting for us there. Velma, a couple of questions; Regarding the Benjamin Birdwell married in Nottinghamshire in 1728, I’ve known of his marriage record but I’d not seen any birth information on him before. However, I do note the birth year provided was after his marriage. Is that how the Ancestral file was shown, or was that a typo in the email ? Also, the statement “The family rep. at that time was ...” is that a reference to an LDS ancestral thing ? In other words, would those people who you wrote to in 1982 be descendents of the Birdwells in those records ? It would be nice to know if someone out there had actually traced back some line to those English folks. Again, Velma thanks for the renewal in interest in our possible English connection. Weldon J. Birdwell, in Montana