At 10:41 PM 1/22/00 CST, you wrote: >Is it easier to find information on the family in the U.K. than it is here? >(Apparently my Blackburns had an aversion to keeping good family records). > It's not so much that the families kept better records but that the civil authorities did. Many of the USA Blackburns seem to pop up in Kentucky, which had one of the worst records in the whole country for civil records (second I think only to North Carolina where my husband's folk are from). I've been told in all seriousness by several historians and family researchers that people came to those areas precisely because records weren't kept. On the other hand, in the UK even before civil records began to be kept in 1837, parish records were carefully made (unless you were Roman Catholic, which can be a problem). Also there are trade directories of the businesspeople issued at regular intervals for all of England, which can be an incredibly useful source of information. Then there were guild and apprenticeship records, landed gentry lists, electoral rolls, you name it, the Brits are keeping track of it somewhere. Makes life very much easier for someone like me whose folk all came from various places in the UK. I'm the first in my family to be born in the US so virtually all my research has been in the UK. Liz Wallis