A good tip I found on the LALONDE List ********************************** A little hint you may find very useful, courtesy of the Executive Officer, Heather Garnsey, at the Society of Australian Genealogists in Sydney, NSW!! Many of us are familiar with the www.familysearch.org site and its online searches, but you may not know of the ability to search via batch number using the International Genealogical Index. Have you ever found an ancestor on film, ordered the film, then searched and searched through it looking for other members of the family?? Really hard work, especially if the eye sight is not too good! Well try this: First of all you MUST have found an ancestor's record on the IGI and it MUST BE from a Parish Record - NOT information someone has submitted. A GENUINE Parish Record extraction will have an upper case M or C preceding a number in the Batch Number section of the Source Information on the IGI record. No M or C?? You need not read any further, as the record has been submitted by someone instead. Select "International Genealogical Index" from the left hand panel. Select "British Isles" (for example) from the region section, and type in the Batch Number from your ancestors sheet. NOTE: you DO NOT put in their name - if you do you only get their record. By just selecting the region, and adding the batch number, and selecting Search, you will bring up everyone on the IGI who has been extracted from that specific parish register!! An example I just tried: Batch number M111102, British Isles, (taken from the sheet recording my GGG grandparents marriage) displays the other 1120 marriages recorded on the film from the Duirinish Parish, Inverness, Scotland - so you need not go blind looking for marriages of your ancestor's relatives!! BUT WAIT!! THERE'S MORE!! By following the same procedures, BUT CHANGING the upper case M to a C - eg for the above: C111102, brings up 2430 Christenings/Births in the Duirinish Parish!! I spent HOURS looking through this film for the christenings/ births of my ggg grandparents' children - but NO luck - so I got excited this morning - BUT no luck again - so perhaps their children were not christened. And a final word: look through very carefully - spelling variations and alphabetical order are problems!! For example McNEILL comes AFTER such names as McPHEE, McQUIN, MORRISON and MUNROE!!!