To any that may have wondered or may yet one day wonder, LDS Film No. 1689023 does in fact appear to reproduce the Naturalization Loose Papers 1849-1887 indexed at ftp://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/il/misc/naturalization/natural.txt The quality of the film I reviewed was very poor. Perhaps 5% of the papers are too dark to even make out a single word. It appears that they were having exposure problems as others are also too light. Most of the film which is readable is blurry, some with double images. But I estimate that one could decipher about 90% of the film if they tried hard enough. Few of the papers would make suitable photocopies, however. I assume the problems I saw were not unique to the film I had. I am hoping IRAD either has a better filming or will make copies from the originals because, now that I have a date, I can get a copy from IRAD. As for content, the papers I saw generally included both intention and final papers. Later papers were mostly fill in the blank forms, earlier papers handwritten letters--probably a notary public. My experience has been that naturalization papers from the mid 19th century were not informative by nature, but these seemed to be about as informative as any. Mine at least had the county of origin in Ireland of my ancestor. The papers are organized roughly, if not rigorously, based on date of final papers. I can understand why IRAD will not search without the date since only a careful page by page search will turn up results otherwise. I estimate that the whole film could be reviewed in about an hour. Most papers are accompanied by a copy of the back of the page which has the name written on it. For this reason, you don't have to search each letter or form for the name, but can just check the name on about every other page....An index and page numbers would speed things up though! Hope someone finds this information useful. Good Hunting. Mark W. Strohbeck strohbmw@wt.net