Uh, oh!! I'm beginning to feel like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman! My difficulty (and I presume the same is true for Peter Abbott and Kevin Sutton) is that I receive files from family researchers who have often collected their data over many years. It is not possible to tell (and they probably cannot recall) where a new +PAGE started. Some of the One-namers are selective, that is they only research a surname for a particular region (I am guilty here because I do not record the Stoke-on-Trent Ibbs names), so the names are not true sequences. Others include related surnames (i.e. related by marriage) within the same file, so I may have a long sequence of Dutton (for instance), some random Trewicks, and a small sequence of Goths where someone has been looking for a specific event. It is impossible for me to be sure that sequences are complete, and difficult at a practical level, to search and insert so many +BREAKs. The only files where that may be achieved is in the few larger files where a contributor has transcribed every instance of a name - and then I would have to insert approximately 250 +BREAKs between 1837 and 1900 (and some files go to 1983)! I can't change them to Random if they have sequences, and I can't tell where the BREAKs should be. Rainman meets Catch22? best wishes :-) Peter On Tue, 16 Oct 2001 18:27:54 +0100, Dave Mayall wrote: >If your files are ONENAME, then you MUST; >1) Insert a +BREAK if you have included 2 variant surnames (or >different surnames) in one quarter, so; >2) Insert a +PAGE if a sequence of names started on one page and ended >on another >If your files are RANDOM and actually contain sequences of data, they >should be ONENAME -- Researching: IBBS from Hunts/Beds and HENDY from Pembrokeshire Transcribing and reformatting for FreeBMD (http://freebmd.rootsweb.com)