This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Author: mindfoggs2 Surnames: Priester/Hoff/Krause Classification: queries Message Board URL: http://boards.rootsweb.com/topics.researchresources.brick-20-walls/120.3/mb.ashx Message Board Post: We don't have a time frame or location for your great grandmother & her marriages. Both of those factors will affect your ability to obtain vital records as the fact that each location marched to it's own tune in so far as when they, the gov't poobahs, started requiring registrations of vital events. That said, your best source for parents for your great-grandmother would be your great-grandmother herself via her marriage certificates/records as already suggested. In general, the vast majority of people know who their parents are/were. The names of the parents of each party to a marriage are required on every marriage certificate I've seen for the US states I've researched my family lines in & for England which started requiring registration of vital events in mid 1837. The other suggested records of baptism/christening can be a bit more problematic....you don't know the church name, the church/parish is gone & no one knows where the records went, the church building burned - happens more frewquently than you may think (we lost a church locally just 3 or 4 years ago & I can recall two others locally before that and one in Ireland just a year ago that had all the records for my mother-in-law's family) & with it the records, the church was Catholic which can be a problem as some parishes/Dioceses in some areas - not all - are not very open & forth coming with releasing nformation from their records, etc. So, for a variety of reasons, baptismal records(church records in general except for the repértoire of Québec) can be a bit harder to track down but if you know the church & location, try looking in the FHL catalog to see if the Mormon's may have filmed the records for the church. You can borrow these films from the main library in Salt Lake through a FHC local to you. Both the catalog and a search function to locate a FHC near you - at the bottom center of the main page as well as under the Library" tab - are at the LDS site Family Search. http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp - main http://www.familysearch.org/eng/Library/FHLC/frameset_fhlc.asp -- libray catalog Check out their Pilot search as well....it's part of the ongoing multi-year project to digitize and put on line the entire FHL. More content is added continually. http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#start If your great-grandmother was in the US & "recent" enough to have had a SSN, then there is always the option - a costly one $27 last I checked - of applying for her SSN application on which she would have had to list her parents' names. The same caveat applies to obits as to information on death certificates. Obit information is only as good as the knowledge of the person supplying it. For example, in researching the children of one of my grandmother's aunts a few years back, I quite unexpectedly found the obit for a son of the aunt I was working on right in the state where I lived! Surprise! I had never had heard of this cousin of my grandmother's from her when she was alive but I knew he was family from all the other research I'd been doing on that particular branch. He was quite old at the time of death & it was apparent from the obit that whoever gave the information didn't know his mother's correct maiden name or perhaps it was a case such as the next bit I address below. The obit said "Deboer" but her maiden was acutally "DeBow". Additionally, the family may actually know the correct information but give a different version intentionally for the obit so people who knew the person in life but didn't know they had died would recognize them via the obit. Such was the case with a recent death in my husband's family where, due to my research, we knew the correct family surnames but the surname had started to get mutated in the mid 1920's from the original. So, we put the surname that has been in general use since abt. 1930 or so in the newspaper obit and by which the family has/is presently known. Not a problem for those of us around at present but it could through someone researching a couple of generations from now off the track. A good place to post which reaches a wide & diverse group of researchers is the Yahoo Group "Brickwall". Even if you only ever post once, you can learn a lot of research methodology for various ethnicities from seeing how the Group members go about finding information for people who have posted a brickwall. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Brickwall/ BTW..."Am I the only one who run into more walls than they cn count?" Nope, you've plenty of company - just look at the number of members/posts at Brickwall Group! Among my brickwalls are locating my grandmother's eldest sister as well as her aunt Minnie, my mother-in-law's great-grandfather as well as her aunt Bea/Bridget here & aunts Rose & Sarah over in Ireland, for one of my great-grandmothers - her youngest sister, the surviving daughter from a 1st marriage of a 2 great-grandfather as well as getting back into the parents listed for him on his DC and the identies of the balance of my paternal grandfather's siblings - filmed records don't go past 1865 & what is surviving is in the basement of the family church over in the home country but I'm here...just to name a few of my walls. Good luck & do try the Brickwall Group if these boards don't work out. Remember, too, to post all you know - names, dates/time frames, locations, other famiy such as children &/or siblings, where/what you have already researched, etc. The more information you give the people you are asking for help, the more likely it is someone may be able to help. 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