<or use a translation site such as babelfish to write your own letter and translate it into German.> Be careful here. Translations sites are only so-so for translating, but using them to compose a letter could be disasterous. They are terrible with syntax, sentence structure & are notorious for having serious problems with words that have more than one meaning. Using them to compose a letter could cause you to inadvertantly insult someone or make sentence structure so obtuse as to be not understandable. For an example, take a long sentence in English & ask the translator to convert it to German. Then take the resulting German sentence & ask the translator to convert it to French. Then French into English. You may end up with jibberish. It is highly recommended that you use form letters written by a native speaker of the language to request records, etc. There are numerous sites that have them, but the one I'm most familiar with is at the Hesse home page http://users.rootsweb.com/~deuhes/Hessen/resources.htm#available and the LDS site has a guide at http://www.familysearch.org/sg/LGGerman.html Regards, Curt