On Fri, 31 Aug 2012 12:58:28 +0100, <[email protected]> wrote: > I have just posted to the GENBRIT list, in answer to a query, a little > tip I learnt quite a few years ago now when researching at FreeBMD. Many > listers may already be familiar with it, and I apologise to them for > being boring (!), but some newer listers and novices to family history > may not have discovered it yet, so I hope it may help them. Hi Roy, Thank you very much for this tip. Even people, like me, who have been researching for years are likely to find it useful if they didn't know about it before. I've searched on unusual first names only, but not on a surname as a middle name. VEATER, the surname of some of my ancestors in the 18th and 19th centuries, is one of the more unusual surnames in my tree. So I put *VEATER into the first name field and found a number of names new to me in Somerset, Gloucestershire and Glamorgan plus one I recognized as my great-grandfather's first cousin. Josephine