My friends - I am dropping by today to give you the solution to the latest Skills Puzzler. You will recall that our scenario involved researching early newspapers for a record of the death of Reuben Bruner. A search was made of one of the two newspapers which were in print for a short time in the early 1830's. A death notice(but not an obituary)was found in one of the local papers several weeks after the death occurred. Our task was see if we can find anything more in the newspapers. We have had 40+ folks who responded to this Puzzler, and everyone spotted a key point, that being that my cousin should have checked the other newspaper of the area for a possible obituary or death notice. That was eventually checked, but a search for any sort of death information, for a period of months after the death occurred, revealed nothing in the other newspaper. Where else is there left to look? Many of you noted that the newspapers from the area in which he had originally settled should be checked. As it turned out, the county from which he came to IN was in Ohio, just across the state line by a short distance. A check there found that an obituary had been printed in a newspaper there, with far more information than the IN paper had carried(although the IN paper eventually "copied" the larger obit from the OH paper and printed it, about 3 months later). The one possible approach that no one really happened to spot was the need to check for a German language newspaper in the area in OH where he had lived for so many years. It turned out that there was such a newspaper, printed irregularly, in that area, and when it was examined, there was a very long obituary for Bruner, giving all of his vital statistics, as well as the maiden name of his wife, what village he had lived in while in Germany, the date of his immigration to America, as well as the names of his parents and grandparents, and the maiden names of the grandmothers. It was a real gold mine. This man had been well known and respected in the German community, and this was reflected in the detail of his obituary. These immigrants still knew people in the old country and the printing of a part of Bruner's ancestry enabled them to make the mental connections with families back in Germany. A lot of early newspaper research will not yield results at all, and the above cited case is a bit of a rarity, since backgrounds and pedigrees were not as compelling to these settlers as they are to us today. But if we keep all of our options before us - and know what they are - when we do perform newspaper research, we maximize our chances of discovering the occasional gold mine. -B ============================================================