Kentucky researchers, This message is being sent to KYROOTS and to the discussion lists for Morgan Co. KY and for two of the counties which were created from parts of it after 1855, namely Rowan (1856) and Elliott (1869). If you use the LDS microfilms, and in particular film #0216,835 which contains birth, death and marriage records for Montgomery and Morgan counties, or if you utilize any transcriptions made from that film, you will want to be aware of a very serious and pervasive, but easily overlooked, error in the filmed 1855 birth records for Morgan Co. It appears that at some point the ledger became unbound, and when it was rebound the pages were inserted in the wrong order. The birth records span across both the left and right hand sides of a ledger, which is numbered only on the left hand page. The left hand page contains the date, child's name, gender, alive vs dead, place of birth, full name of father, and half of the column for maiden name of mother, usually containing only her first name. The right hand page contains the second half of the column for maiden name of mother (usually containing her surname), race, residence of parents, name of midwife or doctor, and other comments (e.g., if the mother died at birth it may be mentioned.) Except for pages 4 and 10, the left and right hand pages as filmed do NOT go together! If someone doesn't notice it, they are likely to obtain the wrong mother's name. Since all the records are written by the same clerk, and almost all of the mother's names are entered with the binding passing neatly between the first and last names, it is very easy to overlook this jumbling unless you are familiar enough with the families to notice that the maiden names are wrong. Here is the order that the pages are bound and filmed: LEFT RIGHT first half of page 1 second half of page 9 first half of page 8 second half of page 2 first half of page 3 second half of page 7 first half of page 6 second half of page 5 first half of page 4 second half of page 4 (OK) first half of page 5 second half of page 6 first half of page 7 second half of page 3 first half of page 2 second half of page 8 first half of page 9 second half of page 1 first half of page 10 second half of page 10 (OK) The identification of the right hand pages was determined in two ways: by looking for long names that cross the binding (e.g., "Bl" on the left page and "ankenship" on the right, or "Mary Elizab" on the left page and "eth" on the right), and by comparison with Morgan County marriage records. Deanna, do you think this would be worth mentioning on the page for Morgan County Vital Records? http://www.rootsweb.com/~kymorgan/mddates.htm Teri Pettit || home: 1048 Almanor Ave. Adobe Systems Inc. || Menlo Park, CA 94025 San Jose, CA 95110-2704 || (650) 326-2363 (408) 536-3086 || email: [email protected] KYGenWeb County Coordinator for Rowan Co. Kentucky: http://www.best.com/~tpettit/rowan/rowan.html (research resources) http://cgi.rootsweb.com/~genbbs/genbbs.cgi/USA/Ky/Rowan (queries)