My friends - We are going to round out this week's data posts with another in the Skills Puzzler series. We have done several of these Puzzlers recently which used, as their basis, interpretation of the population schedules of the federal census records. Because census records are the most used, and yet the most underutilized, of items in the genealogist's "tool kit", we are going to do one more of these census puzzlers, and then we'll move on to another area for awhile. Our scenario is this: we have, in the 1850 census(county and state is irrelevant) a listing for a John Boatswanger, age 32, born NC. Besides himself, his household shows a wife, Penelope, age 26, born KY, and two children, George, age 6, and Mary, age 4, both born KY. Also in the household is Joseph Boatswanger, age 77, born VA. In addition, there is a 24 year old farm laborer(born KY) named Asa Jones in this household. In 1860, we look again for this family - they are gone. There are no Boatswangers in the county in which they lived in 1850, nor in any of the surrounding counties. We suspect that they may have moved west in the decade between 1850 and 1860. But they did not do so, and our task is to find them again in 1860, using *only* the census record - we can assume that we have a "burned county" where no other records are available. What steps, then, should we take - again, using only the census - to find out where they went or what happened to them? If you would like to pass along your thought processes on this one, please feel free to do so, either to the List or to me. I'll be back before the weekend is over with the solution. As is customary, there will be no data posts per se over the weekend, but I expect to be back with either a land grants text file or a cemetery file or two. -B ============================================================