This is a major problem, especially with common surnames. Sometimes you can never sort out one John Brown from another using only one sort of record. But there are several ways to narrow down which John Brown is yours - finding marriage records, death or burial records, obits, land records, court records, wills and other vital records. Also carefully check successive (and preceding) censuses. Note all the clues in each census record - birthplaces, ages, spouses' names and ages, children's names and ages, and NEIGHBORS, then follow up on any and all of those. Do searches on the Internet (lots of them), being as specific as possible without being too specific. (I prefer the search engine Google.com). Allow for spelling variations - and errors - in names, as well as people switching from using their first name to middle name to initials to nickname. Also allow for some errors in ages and birthplaces in census records. There's a great deal of biographical and g! enealogical material out there and it's growing all the time. Good luck! P.S. I still haven't sorted out all my Curtises in early N.C. They all used the same handful of given names and they all had LOTS of sons! JRay38s@aol.com wrote: I have trouble understanding censuses totally. If you are not sure that the person in the census is YOUR person, how do you know who they are. I have looked at many censuses and see lots of families with same last name living near each other but how do you know they are the John Doe you have? Or, they only sometimes have first initials. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos, & more faith.yahoo.com

Janean, If the census is 1850 or after, I can usually sort people out looking for spouses and children, as well as children, and working that along with other information I have on the family. Its not easy, but using the 1920 census I was able to find my Savage/Jamerson connection, as I knew that the person I was looking for died in Claredon, Arkansas in 1921, and found her and her husband, who we thought died in 1892, and a daughter we never knew about. Going back before 1850 is a lot harder, and I need to spend more time comparing bible listings and such to the census takers notes. I have seldom used the mortality tables. I find marriage transcriptions--especially after 1880 when parents names are listed--to be about the best single item around, and then obituaries, but the census does such a good job of putting people in a place and a time that my research isn't done without it. Cindy