My friends - Well, this is the "big night" - when we awake in the morning, we will enter a new century and millennium(even if it really does not begin until 2001). It is an event which we will not again live to see, although there may be some very young children and infants who will survive to see the turn of the century into 2100, especially given the advances in medicine and the fact that people are living longer and longer. I have no particular thoughts about this night, other than the fact that it often strikes me squarely when I am asked by younger people about finding great-grandparents that were born in *this century*. When I consider that all of my great-grandparents were born prior to 1845, it does tend to make me realize my age. The last decade of the current century has seen the greatest expansion of interest in genealogy in the United States in its history. I suspect 2000 and beyond will be no different. To all of you who have sent virtual cards to me with good wishes for the New Year, I thank you. I read them all, and I extend the same good wishes to all of you, as we look to the future. In this last post of the year and century, I am bringing to you another in the Skills Puzzler series. This one is perhaps a little more light-hearted than most of them have been, but it still concerns a part of genealogy that we all confront every day - the problem of sobriquets(a ten-dollar word for "nicknames"). Most of us learn very early on, when we take up genealogy, that certain names had sobriquets, and we watch for them. We know, for example, that if we see the name "Betsey", the woman's true given name was probably Elizabeth(although that is not always true - sometimes a girl was named just Betsey - not Elizabeth). The same is true for the given name Ann - we often see the sobriquet "Nancy" used in documents which are really referring to a woman whose given name was actually Ann. Shown below is a list of ten out-of-the-ordinary sobriquets. Our task is determine what the actual given name may have been for each sobriquet, Here they are: Nellie Ade Xr Hettie Liam Nancy(this one is not the usual "Ann") Succe Sandy Lum Miah If you would like to try these, please feel free to respond to the List or to me privately. I will return over the weekend with the corresponding given names. As is customary, there will be no data posts over the weekend, and time constraints may prevent me from offering a data file, as well, but if I can break loose for other duties long enough to prepare one, I'll drop by with that, as well. A good New Year to all of you who populate this List - one of the finest groups of folks I have ever had the pleasure of working with. -B ============================================================