There is a new lesson on how to do genealogical research on the computer that people might find interesting and helpful. http://freepages.education.rootsweb.com/~dflanagan/start.html This is filled with lots of good links and ideas. The section Web Search Strategies is excellent and useful even to someone who has been doing research for years. http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/atg/introduction.html is an interesting site that tells family history from pictures and papers (letters, diaries, etc) of its members. It is a good example of what you can do to make your family history more interesting than just a recitation of what I call the begats. You know like John begat Mary who begat John who begat Elizabeth, etc.? When you can add anything personal to your family history and then arrange it in story form, it makes it so much more interesting. Several people have let me know I should have added http://www.searchbug.com to my latest list of sites for finding information about people. If you use any of the search engines like searchbug you really should read and save the section on Web Search Strategies cited above. You will get a lot more out of your efforts. I have been researching my family for 48 years now since I was 17 years old. In the early days it was a matter of writing to various places that kept vital records and hoping I could find something. It took a lot longer and cost me a lot more to hire people to search, postage, etc. With the internet we have an amazing amount of data that we can obtain just by paying for our internet connection. There are also sites where we pay a fee and get access to millions of records and things like the actual images of census returns. Many people do not want to pay a fee for anything. Some people just can't afford to do that. A lot of people share all the information they have paid for with others. The genealogy section of computer use has soared and is now I believe the biggest use of the internet aside from email. What amazing changes have occurred in the last 48 years. Bette