My friends - It has taken the better part of the afternoon and early evening to catch up on the requests that were pending as a result of my having been out of town for 4 days. I have now finished those, and if anyone did not receive a response, please let me know by private e-mail, as there may have been one or two that were misplaced. Our new Skills Puzzler for this time will deal further with census interpretation when there are multiple person of the same name in an area. We see a lot of this with the more common names, such as Smith, Jones, Brown, Green and others. Knowing how to work with census records can help us shortcut the process by which we try to narrow down the identically named individuals to the one who is most likely to be ours. Our scenario is this: in the 1850 census of a county in Georgia, we have a man whose name is James Jackson. He is shown as 30 years old, born KY. He has a wife named Jane, also born KY, and 2 children, aged 8 and 6, the elder born KY, the younger born GA. We can safely assume, then, that he migrated to Georgia somewhere in the 1842-1845 time frame. A descendant who is researching the family found a part of an old family Bible, which had the name of a KY county written on the flyleaf - nothing more. The descendant very naturally went to the 1840 census of the KY county to see if perhaps James Jackson was listed. She found 6 James Jacksons in the county. Of these, 3 were thrown out because the age enumerations did not even remotely match those for "her" James Jackson. However, in three other cases, the James Jackson listings showed a male between 20-30 and a female between 20-30 - no children. In one of these 3 cases, there was another male in the household, aged 70-80. These three Jackson households were scattered all over the county and there did not seem to be any visible connection between them. This was in a burned county - all records prior to 1867 were gone, so there was no county documentation to check. However, there is a way to determine, with a good degree of accuracy, which of these 3 James Jackson men is the one we seek - the James Jackson of Georgia in 1850. The question before the house is this: what is the method we need to use, and how do we apply it? If you wish to offer your thoughts on this Puzzler, you can send them to the List, or to me. I'll be back in a day or two with the solution. -B ============================================================