Ron Hughes wrote: :My Great Grandfather was William Rensselaer BROOKS, born between :1821/822. :I've found him and his family on the 1850 and 1860 census, and I :have his Civil War Records. From these documents, I've determined :that he was born in either Sullivan or Orange County, New York. : :Here's my request. If, while browsing through your sources, would :you keep an eye out for a James Brooks that had a son named :William? But of course. I save all the unanswered queries to the list for this purpose. One of the benefits to being subscribed here is that you'll be paged if something turns up. :-) On the other hand, Ron, this is a regionally-focused list. Yes, there's some overlap with PA, and lots with NY (mostly in the post-Revolution years), and you're most welcome here -- but I'm not personally researching anything that far south. I also *avoid* the published compilations you referenced (cf. Seaver) in favor of building my trees event by event and person by person from primary records whenever possible. This method may seem backward, but it works for me. :-) For the record, there isn't A (as in ONE) "Brooks Genealogy" book, and for good reason. First, if the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire is correct, BROOKS was the 82d most common English name in the U.S. back in the 1930s. Secondly, hundreds of thousands if not millions living today descend in one way or another from at least 10 to 12 Brooks men who were in New England by 1660. Even more Brooks families descend from hundreds or thousands of subsequent immigrants up to the present day named BROOKS or ROUSSEAU or BROEK or who knows what else. If you add in the known Southern progenitors, your finished work would be the size of the World Book Encyclopedia. Seaver's little booklet, by contrast, contains a narrow descendant line of just one founder, William Brooks of Springfield, and little else that's reliable. One other work, "Brooks and Allied Families" by Ida (Ketcham?), is entirely concerned with North Carolina roots and I've found no overlap with the New England progenitors. Each of these works represents a decimal fraction of the BROOKS genealogy universe. >From time to time I own up to the hope of publishing on the New England Brooks families myself, on the model of the "Mary and John" series -- initially, one volume for the first five (or as many more will fit) generations of each of the 10 early (by 1660) New England progenitors. Since the biggest obstacle to such a production -- the cost of traditional printing and distribution -- has vanished with the advent of the CD burner, the PDF format and the ebook, my greatest barriers now are time and my own inadequacies. So while "the Brooks Genealogy" doesn't yet exist, we're building one here for a small, regionally defined and clearly identifiable group of families. That's a start. Chris