In a message dated 1/28/03 11:36:16 AM Central Standard Time, dman@westpa.net writes: << aw your posting on the spelling of the Gross name. In the one census I found, my George Gross was born in USA, but his wife was born in Germany, and they have Gross as Grofs To find the tutorials at google, what do I type in the search engine. >> As a transcriber and State Coordinator for USGenWeb Census Project, I have run into the problem of deciphering old handwriting. For some reason "ss" was written to look like "fs". The bottom loop of the "f" was written backwards. Myra