Thanks to Fletch for posting the Hartman inventory. It is a little surprising that 27 cards full of Thomas Blanchards did not contain the popular immigrant, but this was evidently a research tool aimed at several things, and Thomas[1] was not the focus. Too obvious, perhaps. > 1 envelope of misc. NY City and other NY Census records and 1 page > which may be a list of published Genealogies. 1st and last lines read: > > LIHS > Abbot A & E Abbot 197p - 1847 Yes, this is "A genealogical register of the descendants of George Abbot, of Andover; George Abbot, of Rowley..." by Abiel and Ephraim Abbot. I have seen a copy of it. The dates within it before 1752 were all retroactively converted to Gregorian, which makes for a very confusing comparison with other records. > . > . > 1823/4 Cutter W R Cutter 432 p 1871/5 This appears to be the "History of the Cutter family of New England" by Benjamin Cutter, revised and enlarged by William R. Cutter in 1871 (except that it had only 363 pages in 1871 -- maybe it was further expanded in 1875). > Transcribing Hartman's cards into some sort of useable database > would be a monumental task! If the cards are all typed, instead of hand-written, it may not be quite so bad. Scanning and OCR might produce a satisfactory result. For comparison, I note that a collection of cards of something like the same size (a genealogy of families of Braintree, Mass, including lots of Blanchards, by the way) was transcribed by hand by one person. That took considerable dedication! As for making such a database useful, I figure the card file is basically ready "as is" -- the cards are already alphabetized by name. Such a file could be served up by a browser through a hierarchical index like the one on Gendex. John