A few more anecdotes may help in terms of chasing down ancestors. That Lux. family of mine had the wife's maiden name missing an essential consonant, which would have frustrated finding her by that name when using a Soundex index, a great device to get around the vowel problem but one missing consonant can render it useless. That was a similar issue when I tried finding a census for my Koehler ancestor (another Lux. ancestor), who was alive in the U.S. just long enough for one census. I read and re-read the Kohler-type entries on the Soundexed index film for 1900 in the only possible state for this family. Then one day, the motorized film advance stopped abruptly and at random at exactly the right card for the family, which was listed as Krohler because someone writing up the index card reversed the "o" and "e" and then someone else organizing the cards for filming misread the "e" as an "r." The census page itself had the name right. Then, just yesterday, I spent way too much time with Heritage Quest while trying to find a known New Haven CT family for whom I had just collected the sons' WWI draft card info, showing where they should have been in 1900. No amount of demographic-tracing techniques made them appear, so I tried the mother, age and birthplace unknown, for 1920 in New Haven County. She popped up in just the right place, with her boys and an unmarried sister. Still could not find the family in 1910 but it again showed up in exactly the same place when I used the sister's name (handwriting on the page was so faint that only the sister's name could be read and listed in HQ indexing). 1900 then should have been easy, but the reason why I could not find it earlier became evident when the family was finally found under a different surname: O'Connor rather than O'Connell. The censustaker had it wrong, but had everything else about them right. I now have the best clue in all my years of researching, to find more about my Ann Connell, for whom I only have the fact that she married Michael Donnellan and had one child in 1837 recorded in parish records, at the same time/same place that the New Haven O'Connells were having the children described by a current descendant whose posting I finally unearthed this week. That slim thread will be the woof to weave together the extended family. The number of O'Connell families in Connecticut has been truly astonishing, so this is my needle in a haystack. Sharon C. Kevin Fitzpatrick <k_fitz29@yahoo.com> wrote: Thanks Sharon..............guess I should concentrate my efforts on NARA. Kevin ----- Original Message ---- From: sharon carberry To: irl-clare-projects@rootsweb.com Sent: Thursday, June 7, 2007 6:53:48 AM Subject: Re: [IRL-CLARE-PROJECTS] Castle Garden Let me add a little something to what Jeanne posted... --------------------------------- Looking for a deal? Find great prices on flights and hotels with Yahoo! FareChase.