I thought that fellow listers might appreciate a success story. My father told me he came from game-keeping stock in Yorkshire, he was the youngest of 10 and that his father was Charles Powell and his mother Alice (nee Burnside(s)). In the early 70s I took my first tentative steps in to the world of research and I set out to find out Dad's family. I eventually managed to track down the birth entry for Charles Henry Powell and from that discovered that his parents were Charles Powell and Hannah nee Verril. As Dad had told me, Grandfather had been born in Yorkshire and his father was a gamekeeper. You can therefore imagine my surprise when I purchased a copy of the marriage certificate of Charles and Hannah to see that they were married in Mansell Lacy, Herefordshire. To add insult to injury the name of Charles' father was unreadable. I was pretty much a total novice in the world of family history and it took several months of staring at the certificate to realise that Charles' father wasn't called Jim or Tom, as I had first thought, but that the Registrar had used the accepted abbreviation, Wm. I then began a systematic search of all the William Powells in and around Mansell Lacy. This stage should have been simple until I discovered how many William Powells there are living on the Welsh borders! Try as I might, I couldn't find the connection and I am ashamed to say that around 1987 I gave up on the Powell side and concentrated instead on my mother's side of the family. . Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and e-mail in particular, last year I was able to "discover" 2 distant cousins - one in Canada who had managed to track down the illusive William and a few months later was put in contact with another in South Wales (thank you Gordon Evans!). Since then our tree has grown "like Topsy" and we now have an impressive list of ancestors; siblings, offspring etc., not to mention a wide variety of occupations ranging from generations of gamekeepers, masons, sawyers/ carpenters, tailors and a Royal Marine who served on the Royal Yacht of the time, the Victoria & Albert. We are back to the mid 1700s with the family living in Shobdon. We have unearthed more questions than answers, but that is the joy of this hobby. The most important thing is, never give up hope and don't forget to put your interests on every list you can - it certainly paid off with us! Mandy in Windermere