Thanks for your posting Lesley. >> There's another Elisabeth Balmer ... >> > She's certainly Borders-based. She's in my system because her > parents-in-law, Thomas Gibson and Ann Bowmaker, lived and died in > Whitsome. Her husband, George, was a stone breaker. > There were other Balmers on the farms of Whitsome in the early 19th > century, but I'm only just getting started on the farming families. Any scraps you come up with could be invaluable. The problem is not unique to the Balmers, but many of the children seem not to have been registered at birth, or at least have not found their way onto the GRO(S) website, There is also often a gap of a generation when a family left the Borders and again when the ex-Border families left Ireland. It all adds to the challenge. Kind regards, Jim Balmer