Pennsylvania State Archives website has early property records for Pennsylvania, including maps. Maryland Archives also has early property records on their website. Many Genweb sites include 18th Century deed abstracts. Many old county histories and religious histories are scanned on Archive.org and Google books. They often contain biographies and early tax records. The Brethren Website has 18th century baptism records. There are also Mennonite obituaries from about 1860's to current times online, and also Brethren obituary lists online. Many early ship lists are on line, census records are on line, and many other records. Doing a Google search on a name is a good start for finding some of these records. Ancestry also has a lot of tax and land records, but you have to pay the membership fee to get access. One caution is that there is a great deal of misinformation on the various genealogy websites, including Ancestry and Find-a-grave. Takes a lot of time and effort to find some of this info, and even more time to validate it. This rootsweb list is a good sounding board for info you don't have confidence in. Bill Thomas -----Original Message----- From: Linda M Wroth Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 10:01 PM To: brethren@rootsweb.com Subject: [BRE] Introduction I'm curious where you find all the information you've been discussing in the thread Connections to 1733 Ship Hope. I joined the group because I started a family tree on Ancestry.com and found out my father's family were mostly Dunkards, Brethren, and Mennonites. I've seen Find-A-Grave notices that a number of them were buried in Brethren or Mennonite cemeteries, but I haven't put much together yet. My grandparents and maybe great-grandparents lived in Stark County, Ohio; some of the surnames back to the 1700s are Martin, Geis, Koppes, Koontz/Kuntz, Shaeffer/Shafer, Glessner, Lehnert, Becker, Metzler, Means, Horst, and Swartz. Living in California, I don't have access to local resources and wondered if there are any online resources or books to fill in the details of the lives of these people or the communities in general. Thank you, Linda Linda M Wroth lmwroth@me.com Richmond, California ------------------------ Search the Archives at http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/BRETHREN ------------------------ ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to BRETHREN-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message