Believe it or not, up until Christmas 2004 the most luck we had had on our family tree was with maternal lines! Although I and several of my cousins have been working on our trees since the 70s we connected with many cousins from my mother's mother's, mother's line and ended up with a tree of 11 generations (over 7600 known descendants and counting. Then found cousins from my ggrandmother's mother's line and again ended up with 11 generations. Unfortunately, I am a second generation descendant of immigrants on nearly all sides so quickly ran into brick walls. My maternal grandfather's father was born in Ireland and even though my maternal uncle visited Ireland and found the birth records for him and his brother who both immigrated he could not find a marriage record for their parents. The whole bit was repeated by a BYRNE researcher in Ireland and he also ran into the same deadend. The same uncle visited Dublin, Ireland trying to find the birth record for my mother's mother's paternal grandfather, and again ran into a deadend, although on his marriage record in England he states that was where he was born. My father's father was born in Bohemia. His mother's line we have back to 1797 in NY before we hit a brick wall. My mother's paternal grandmother's line we have back to the mid 1700s in County Cork, Ireland. Then at Christmas time in 2004 I got the best Christmas present ever. I was contacted by a man who said he had a Bohemian family in his tree that looked just like mine. He had hired a Czech researcher and had been to the Czech Republic to visit the places were his family had lived. Checking with his researcher he got the birthdates of the connecting family and they all matched mine. Turned out our paternal ggrandfather had a brother who had immigrated to Chicago and so we had a whole mess of cousins we didn't know about. At Christmas time this cousin sent me copies of all his research and we now finally have a male line back to the 1650s!!! Fifteen generations!! And he has been sending photos of the houses in the Czech Republic where my grandfather and ggrandfather were born and where the generations before that were born in another town. Those houses are still there and still occupied by descendants!! So I agree, never stick to just the male lines, always do what you can on the spousal lines also. If I had just stuck to the male lines I would have been dead in the water after about 5 years. Instead I have enjoyed 37 years of very productive research and have "met" many, many cousins from all over the world on the net and worked with many of them for 20 years to make the parts of the trees that we could do as accurate and complete as possible. Annie in Minnesota In a message dated 12/30/2010 5:50:52 A.M. Central Standard Time, pamtessier@sympatico.ca writes: Just for fun, try it! These women were as much responsible for your existence as the woman who married your 3Xgreat grandfather and certainly deserve recognition from you, their descendant.