Hi Carrie, Thanks for your accurate description of Heritage Quest and your comparison of Heritage Quest and Ancestry. While I use both Heritage Quest and Ancestry, they both offer some unique differences in some of the search methods that you can use. For example, I have found some information using Advanced Search methods on Heritage Quest that I was unable to locate on Ancestry. I used a combination of First Name (William), Age (31-40) and Birthplace (Missouri) which yielded scads of names. But when I then searched down the stage list and focused on Military and Naval, I was able to locate William Galbraith serving in the Spanish-American War in Puerto Rico. His last name was misspelled Galbrraith which prevented me from locating it using his last name. Place of birth for both of his parents provided supporting evidence. All of my earlier searches in Illinois and Missouri had been unsuccessful. (It would have helped if I had known that he was a Spanish American War veteran. Only a trip to the cemetery provided that clue. It also would have helped if I had paid more attention in American History class.) On the other hand, Ancestry does offer the advantage of searching using an * after the first five letters of a last name in order to locate all last names built around those first five letters. I have found that to be quite advantageous in that I don't seem to be able to conjure up all of the possible ways of misspelling my relatives names. For those of you who search the State of Illinois records, be sure to take advantage of that flexible search engine. I was very frustrated when I could not locate my grandfather, Fred Bergmire, in the death record file even when I knew the county and death date. Finally I stopped being so accurate and decided to just search part of the last name. Using Bergm gave me too many returns. I got all those Bergmans. So I added the letter i and searched Bergmi. Scanning just a few names brought a big smile to my face when I found Grandpa listed as Fred Bergmira. Somebody along the way misread a letter which resulted in Grandpa being changed from a German to an Italian. Regardless I was able to get a copy of the death certificate. I would love to hear other suggestions on advanced techniques used in searching Heritage Quest and Ancestry. Michael Bergmire Ballwin, MO ----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrie" <hetaerae@swbell.net> To: <ILMADISO-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Saturday, August 21, 2004 10:46 PM Subject: [ILMADISO-L] Heritage Quest Online > I forgot to mention that Heritage Quest has the 1900 census,for all 50 > states while Ancestry.com has only a few states for 1900. Heritage Quest > also has the 1910 census images liked to their search engine, while > Ancestry.com does not ythat is, you can search on Ancestry.com, but you > will then have to browse the census images to find what you're looking for. > > > Carrie