In a message dated 9/30/98, 10:45:10 AM, frfg@worldnet.att.net writes: << I offered to look at the cd and discovered so many of the same surnames that I needed a place to begin. However, the request was so general that the state was not known, When I searched the cd there many,many persons with the same first inital and first name and surname in many places. When I asked for a place, the answer was again quite vague. I like to help, but please try to be specific, or give an area of the country i.e. Pennsylvania, New England ets. then it would have been quite easy to cut and paste the information. When a person starts family research it is very important to start with yourself and where you were born, this narrows down birth parents to a place and makes researching books and cd's much easier.>> Hi, I didn't see the query that mom sent you. She is doing research on her side of the family, I do research on my dad's side. Again, we need to remember that people who are not familiar or well versed with the web and computers may be good at genealogy research off the computers. As a rule, I always start big with something like a query, just to find out if there are any surnames on the media that I am interested in. Then narrow it down to specific people if there are too many on a broad scope. The problem is that when you run into someone like my mom, she has so many names she is researching that it's like a black hole. She spends about 10 hours a day, every day, researching and has a houseful of data. And that's without doing much research on the net yet!! You were asking for specific places for the names, also. She knows the migration path of just about all her names, so would have several locations for each. I will work on getting her up to speed on how to write queries, what to expect and what formats are easiest for the person doing the lookups. That should help the volunteer that is helping her. I think she has the data she needed from the two CDs she was asking about, so don't worry about her query. Thanks so much for all your time and efforts. Cheryl