I have discovered a couple things about the Social Security Death Index that are worth sharing. First there is apparently a limit on the number of characters. I was searching for Schaffenacker which is a most uncommon name in the US. When I finally found it there were 16 in the whole US. But it too forever to find it because they have it as Schaffenacke - no r. Possibly there is a 12 character limit since they were all spelled that way. Second, when you can't find George R. Jones try G. R. Jones or even G. Jones. Why some of them are like that I don't know because in my case the person went by his full name. It seems simple but I didn't think of when I was tearing my hair looking for someone. Cheryl Rothwell [email protected] Logan County ILGenWeb www.rootsweb.com/~illogan Central IL Regional Coordinator, ILGenWeb Clark, Downing, Harding, Lucas, et al -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.11.9 - Release Date: 5/12/2005

Cheryl: Question: In the case of a very uncommon name like Shaffenacker, would the Social Security index let you search on only the last name? How about using the asterisk? Comment: It was before the days of Social Security, but I found a reference to the original Schaffenacker immigrant as George C. Schafnager. His son, George S., married my ggrandfather, Matthew Stoll's sister Katherine. The other son, Frederick, had a son named George F. who married Matthew's oldest daughter! Such was life in the early days of non-English immigrants. Also a couple centuries back in Berks County, PA, some of my German-name ancestors "migrated" to more English-based spellings without the umlauts. Sometimes sons of one couple went to 3 or 4 different spellings in one generation. I guess spelling was just not that important. On the other hand, it may have happened in Logan County as well. I was told that Loetterle, Litterly, Letterly, etc. may have emerged from some sort of family disagreement.