I received the Vital Records Index of North America from the LDS. It contains a viewer, one CD of births and six CDs of marriage records. The dates on these records range from 1631 to 1888 and come from both the US and Canada. I was able to locate both marriages of one of my 3great grandfathers, Samuel Downing, in Pike County, Ohio, one in 1818 and one in 1837. It gives the names of the parties, the date, the location [county] and, in some case, other relatives. In most cases it notes if one party was married before but I know Samuel married his widowed sister-in-law the second time and I didn't see that noted. I also note his first wife is listed as Margaret Mathews. We have Samuel's Bible and her name was Matthews. This could be a typo or an error in the original record. There is a FHL number associated with each record. I am guessing that is a microfilm number as both of those marriages, 20 years apart, were in the same county and on the same FHL number. You can also search and get a list of all records for, say, Pike County, OH. These records require a Pentium processor, a minimum of 8 MB RAM, 4X CD drive and 25 MB hard drive space so they aren't for everyone. But they are quite reasonable -- under $20. Cheryl Rothwell clrothwell@mindspring.com Logan County, ILGenWeb, coordinator http://www.rootsweb.com/~illogan/loindex.htm Logan County mailing list> LOGAN-L@rootsweb.com Downing mailing list> DOWNING-L@rootsweb.com Richard III Society mailing list