Folks, For those of us in North America who have Hancock ancestors from the United Kingdom, once we have exhausted the BMD indexes back to 1837 and the U.K. censuses back to 1841, to go back to earlier years we must use the U.K.'s old parish registers. This can appear to be a barrier to further research. Fortunately there are two convenient and free tools that we can use to master the parish register system: 1. http://www.freereg.org.uk is a searchable database of parish register data. As of 10 March 2013 it contained 4,005,835 Marriages, 11,782,431 Baptisms and 8,020,248 Burials. This includes some data not available in the large subscription-based genealogy systems. 2. http://www.geograph.org.uk/mapbrowse.php is a nice mapping tool that lets you drill down and find the location of parishes -- and see photographs of key sites in and around each parish. Dan Hancock