My friends - I want to stop by and give you the solution to the latest Skills Puzzler concerning Census Interpretation. I had only 4 responses on this one, which leads me to believe that it was a tough one. All of the responses outlined very solid approaches that could be taken to try to resolve the question before us. However, they did not address how to directly use census records(which was the theme of this Puzzler) alone to resolve the issue. You will recall that our goal was to determine which of 3 men with the name James Jackson, shown in a "burned" KY county in the 1840 census, is most likely identical to the known ancestor of the researcher, who appears in a GA county in the 1850 census. Any of the three KY Jackson men, based upon the age enumerations, could be the 1850 GA Jackson. In this case, the descendant copied, from the 1850 GA census record, the names of 20 families above and 20 families below the listing for James Jackson. She then went back to the 1840 census and compared the GA neighborhood to the neighborhoods of each of the three James Jacksons in the KY county. In only one instance did she find a match. There were 9 families living close to one of these James Jackson men, out of 32 family names that were copied from the 1850 GA census. As a result, there is very little doubt that the 1840 KY James Jackson with some of the same neighbors as the James Jackson in GA in 1850 is the same man - and he was not the James Jackson in KY with the elderly man living in the household in 1840. What good did this do for our researcher? After having made the match, she went back to the 1840 census record and copied the names of neighbors close to her James Jackson who were not on the 1850 GA census. Looking again at the matching families in the two census records, she found that almost all of the older ones(in the 1850 GA census) were born in NC. As a result, she was able, after some additional research in NC, to pinpoint where the families originated, and she also found several of the older 1840 neighbors in that area, and some of them were found to be relatives, including a family which was found to be a part of James Jackson's wife's lineage. This could have been done by using only the 1850 GA census, but by using both census records, she was able to add surnames to her hunt, which undoubtedly helped reduce the time spent in the NC portion of the research. If we use census records to the fullest extent possible, they can often still provide clues when we may think we have exhausted everything in them. -B ============================================================