Here is an object lesson which I experienced yesterday. The point of this story is that good research includes preserving information on both (1) the ancestors you know to be in your family and (2) other residents in communities that you research when they share characteristics of your ancestors. This is particularly true for Irish family history, but the experience yesterday involved my Luxembourg line, the ones who so often in U.S. records of the mid to late 1800s were shown as being German (because they spoke German). So, anyone of that era insisting on being noted as from Luxembourg or Belgium is significant. I dutifully noted such people when I was doing my New York research some ten years ago. The other critical activity which led to yesterday's success was my habit of visually scanning everything I find on the Internet to see if I can gain something of use from the webpage, no matter how improbable. I happen to have an ability to read material quickly to find particular words or phrases. I also keep in mind a large number of surnames, in my families' histories and some for other researchers as well. I keep ever mindful that new material comes online every day, so even if I have seen material in the past on a particular source, a new page on that source or an updated page previously viewed may now have significant new information. Yesterday I encountered yet another webpage on the Luxemburger Gazette, which had comprehensive coverage in the late 1800s of all Lux (and many Belgians since an 1837 treaty resulted in a large number of Lux.families being in Belgium territory) who came to the U.S., no matter how humble their circumstances. We who do Lux. research know about this source, although getting to the original newspaper articles is difficult since only very major libraries carry it. My eye caught the name Carels as I scanned the webpage containing some obituaries. I read (in German but online dictionaries abound) that the decedent's sisters included a Catherine Jerson. I already knew of this deceased man since I am in contact with his descendant, from the days when I was on the Brooklyn mailing list. There is already a known Brooklyn marriage between a Bretz of his line with a person in my maternal line (so directly related that I am not providing the surname). Now however my Brooklyn contact and I have another intermarriage, because this Catherine Jerson's only child married and lived out his years with my family's Margaret, in Kingston NY, some 70 miles north of Brooklyn. The point of this message, though, is the fact that I have been preserving the records of the only other Belgian woman in Kingston in the mid-1800s, an Anna Fox, too old to be the daughter of anyone whom I or my Brooklyn contact have been researching. What I learned last night when I contacted him about the obituary is that my Brooklyn buddy has the will of Catherine and Peter's sister which named this Anna Fox and her two daughters as beneficiaries because Anna is yet another Carels sister, without providing a placename for the Foxes. So, my Brooklyn buddy had no idea where to look for them, and I had them in their location but did not know the relationship. The Fox family lived in Kingston, always close to my John and Catherine Jerson. This story certainly has relevance to our Irish research, because, as I have seen in New York and in Wisconsin (where so many Luxembourg and Belgian families emigrated) is that these nationalities readily intermarried with Irish immigrants. I suppose that, not only sharing the Catholic religion, but also being farmers in underpopulated remote communities, the Lux. and Belgian families did not see themselves as being so German that they shared a prevalent attitude of that era, that the Germans did not mix with the Irish. Each nationality tended to have its own church and cemetery. It was so in Kingston, to a strict degree. I also have seen the Irish up and leave their farms after decades when they became far outnumbered by the Germans in Wisconsin. Thus the migration route carried on to Texas, the Dakotas, Washington state, Colorado, and California many years after the famine and initial settlement on owned property in Wisconsin. So, review anything of seemingly remote relevance, preserve as much as you can for those who share characteristics with your ancestors, share info with other family historians, and do not shy away from records (even if in a foreign language) for families with non-Irish names, because Irish sisters had to get married and they did marry non-Irish. Sharon Carberry Georgia