In a message dated 29/05/2007 10:44:57 GMT Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: Many thanks Geoff for your prompt reply, I wil follow up the leads you have given. It seems the parents names just don't seem to be on any records, & the Ross family has come to a dead end but I wil keep trying. Thanks again, Dorothy Dorothy: First, my apologies for the various typos in my first message. I hope the sense of what I wrote still managed to come through! Second, looking at the problem again, I notice that you have not said what your evidence is that Edward Ross was born in Benton in 1788. Given that you said "born" and not "baptised", it seems to me not impossible that you have obtained it from a census age and birthplace. Census ages are notoriously unreliable, but I did search 1785-1790, inclusive, thus allowing for your date to be a few years out. It is the "Benton" that now worries me. The sort of thing that often happened, and may have happened here, is that a person may not really have known whee they were born, it never having seemed important to him before, and his parents being either dead or living some distance away, he couldn't check with them at census time. If the earliest he could remember was when he lived in Benton, he may just have assumed that was where he had been born. He may therefore have been born almost anywhere else! Another possible explanation is that perhaps he really was born in Benton but his parents were not C of E. They could have taken him to the nearest Methodist of Presbyterian (say) church for baptism. 1788 is rather early for a Methodist church - at least for one with surviving registers - but on Tyneside Presbyterian churches tended to be concentrated in the ports of Newcastle and North Shields. Of the two, Newcastle is probably a better bet than North Shields (N Shields tended to have the Scottish sailors and their families). By no means all the Presbyterian and Independant churches of Newcastle have had their registers included on, say, the IGI, so a baptism could well be hiding there. Most local Presbyterians were first or second generation immigrants from Scotland (the Church of Scotland is Presbyterian), and in your case the surname Ross does tend to bear that out as an origin for the family. Perhaps a search of Newcastle Presbyterian registers of the period is called for. If so, I would suggest you give some priority to the John Know Presbyterian Church in the Graot Market, as that was not only one of the main ones, but it received comparatively little attention from modern transcribers and indexers (though H M Wood did transcribe it about a century ago!). Geoff Nicholson