> A lot of people still do not own a computer. Have you ever thought about > doing a mailing or making a few phone calls to people with the last > name of > FULLER? Elaine, First, computers are very very common in America. True, they aren't "universal", but by far the majority of homes now have a computer. Most recent numbers I've seen are that between 75 and 78% of American households have a computer! (There are 235 Million PCs "in use", but that counts households like mine, where we have seven...) Second, a paper mailing is a nice idea, but where do we get the money? The reason people do contacts like this via email is that they are FREE! (And, the majority of "fullers" HAVE a computer, if the odds play out...) FULLER, according to US Census data, is the 234th most common surname in America. That means there are approximately 112,000 people in America with the surname FULLER. If you had a bulk mail license, and a good program for looking up mailing addresses, you could probably send something to these folks for about 25 cents each, if it was "postcard" format. So, if you are someone you know wants to send the project $30,000, I'm sure that someone will get right on that. 8-) Now, to take a combination of that data and turn it into a workable idea . . . . There's a pretty nice Surname Popularity table at this site: http://names.mongabay.com/most_common_surnames.htm And "Yahoo" is a very common place for people to have an email address. the problem is, that if you search only by "surname", you will only get 200 replies, which means first names = Alice and you don't get any of the B-Z folks. So . . . combine the "most common given names" with the surname "Fuller" in a "Yahoo people search" and what happens. Email addresses for: 170 people named James Fuller (most common male name) 171 people named John Fuller (2nd most common male name) 200 people named Robert/Bob Fuller (3rd most common male name) 200 people named Michael/Mike Fuller (4th most common male name) 166 people named William/Bill Fuller (5th most common male name) and so on through 1 person named Freddie Fuller (299th most common male name) 2 people named Wade Fuller (300th most common male name) (You could do the women as well, as many of them will be married to an "eligible" fuller, or have a father who would be an "eligible" fuller). The problem would be that of the 10,000 or so folks that you could get email addresses this way, most would qualify based on the fact that they are a FULLER of male descent, but the vast majority of them would have NO CLUE what their line of descent was. It still might be interesting to do though . . . if you sent to 10,000 emails and got a 2% return, you would still have 200 more fuller DNA sets to put in the pool, and it may be that people would take an interest in genealogy as a result of the invitation. (Which should include links to the FULLER mailing list on Roots-l, as well as any major genealogy sources that might help move this along.) I am *NOT* a male FULLER (obviously), but I'd be happy to help on the technology end of pulling something like this together. _-_ gary warner ================================= Mine (Warner) is 344th with 77,000 of us. Your "knock on the door" method probably would work much better with surnames like my wife's maiden name "BAKIE", which doesn't show up on the table of the 100,000 most common surnames in the US. (So far, every one I've talked to is related, including those in Arizona, Ohio, Maryland, Rhode Island, Australia, Scotland, Canada and South Africa). Bakies seem to live forever, have very few children, correspond frequently and keep letters forever. Even "SCHISSLER" (my mother's name) does alright with that, but again, its the 24,239th most common surname in America. Less than 1,000 Schisslers, and these fall into two families. Schisslers who came to Pennsylvania during the American revolution, and Schisslers who came from the Volga River Valley Germans from russia -- the vicinity of Walter, Saratov, Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, when Schissler was the most common surname in town. (Though often spelled Schoessler and Schuessler if you were part of that gang).