I've noticed several complaints about the incomplete and unhelpful search programs on various databases. I use them a lot, and have a couple of tricks to share. [none of this is special to me; I got them from other people, or the instructions.] The first rule is, LESS IS BETTER. Put in a surname and year; if there are too many hits, narrow it down with other fields, one-at-a-time. Using the wildcards can improve hits--just use the first 3 or more letters of a given or surname, then the asterisk *. Or use the "?" for a single letter. e.g., ranso* gets 12,664 hits like ransom/e, ranson/e, ransohoffer; ranso? gets only 11,865 hits for ransom, ranson, ransoh; ranso?? gets 775 hits, mostly ransome, ransone [given name] matilda gets 35,525 hits; using "matild*" gets 475 more hits[35,991], including matildah. Use every possible spelling you can think of. Sometimes, I go to SSDI and ask for metaphone & soundex on a name, and get 10-50 different spellings of the same name. Especially foreign names . . . e.g., my SEPETOWSKI list at http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/message/an/surnames.sepetowski/7 You can narrow a search engine to a neighborhood or all Germans, etc., if you leave out the names, just use the advanced filter features, like state-county-township, and page, or birth, or age, or birthplace. Look through the results for likely suspects. I finally found my great-grandfather in the index, years after I found him "the old fashioned way", because he was listed as "James DeGraves" instead of "James D GRAVES". A township may only have a hundred or three hundred families, which isn't a lot to look through, 10-at-a-time, in the results. A bonus is, you get to see all the neighbors. You'll quickly find all sorts of mis-spellings, and hopefully say a prayer for the saints who TRY to put these things together! But now you have clues about "George/Geroge [almost 40,000 Geroge listings!]" and "SIMTH/SMIHT/SMITH" [there are 139 SIMTH and 660 SMIHT listings in the indices]. So try all sorts of mis-spellings; you may find your [wo]man. I've found many married women by looking for only their first name and age, maybe a state or county if I get too many hits. You don't need a surname to search. Just an eye for likely suspects, by neighborhood, or by familiar name, or others-in-household. You can put in a Soundex code instead of a surname [same as using the Soundex dropdown, I suppose]. Ancestry also has the AIS indices, which are reported to have a 20% error rate. They are what we have used for years in libraries. The good part is, you can now search for all the things listed above, and get a whole lot more use out of an AIS index., like getting everyone on a census page [neighborhood] listed together. See http://www.ancestry.com/search/rectype/census/ais/main.htm The only trouble is, you have to note the census page, then go over to images and track it down manually if you want to see the actual entries. Not too difficult, especially for those of us who remember 286 computers and 300-baud modems. I hope other people will share their tricks at using the index features. I've had a lot of fun over the past few months, tracking down everyone in my FO database, and saving the census image in scrapbook, along with entering them in census facts. FO allows me to then print out the [e.g.] "1840 census" source list, and I can see everyone and everything I've entered. It helps me check off who "still needs to be found". Mike RANSOM