Thanks for your reply Mike. "I have been a research historian for over 30 years and although demography is not one of my areas of interest, certainly rural history since 1700 is right up my street. This means that I am familiar with the language of rural society and its source materials. My wife is a trained librarian .." Now I understand why you've made such remarkable headway so quickly! Glad to have you on side!! "Apart from IGI entries, my wife has also been through the GRO indexes. We are lucky that Hull Central Library has these on microfische, and laborious though it has been, my wife has gone through them not only for Lovelocks but also for the many other grand-parental names. The generation of my Jane Lovelock, for example, contains 16 grand parents (though since my mother was Irish, half of all my generational grandparents have been put to one side for the moment)." Do you mean for all of England? Hell. That's a huge undertaking. You don't happen to have it typed up on a database or speadsheet that you'd be willing to share would you? It would be a fabulous resource for the Lovelock/luck websites! I have such a resource for my other main surname of interest: STERRY so I know the work involved. And I only extracted a part of it! Amazing. Check out my Sterry website if you're interested. (See below) "We are hoping to check out some of the main actors in the IGI lists by reference to the parish registers. The Hampshire Gen Soc website indicates that Hampshire Record Office offers these registers on microfische, and we have ordered a number of likely suspects (but it takes several weeks to process the orders)." "We visited the Family Records Centre in London last Summer, hence our familiarity with the 1841-91 censuses, but at the time we hadn’t really discovered much about the Lovelock connection, so we plan to go again this Summer." Fantastic!! Would it be imposing too much if you noted down and shared all instances of Lovelocks you come across - regardless of whether they appear to be related or not? I suspect you'd do this anyway - but some people only seem to sample when they do parish searches. The fiche will be a wonderful resource. And of course you have a fiche reader at home - I'm green with envy. They cost an arm and a leg here! I was in London at the end of May last and managed to grab some time from our hectic travel agenda (it's a long way from Australia to England and one feels compelled to make the most of every minute!) to do a bit of research at the PRO - ah, that mecca of English archives! - and at SOG. Wonderful to be able to access all those local resources - well, at least from my point of view Yorkshire is just a hop and skip to London! ;-) "You asked specifically about the Surname Index for 1851 and how we connected Caroline Lovelock with Thomas Hooker. It was all part of that laborious trawl through the GRO, plus making an initial guess about identifying a Caroline (anybody, but in this case Hooker) in the right parish, and then going back to the GRO and looking up Caroline’s marriage and cross-referring it to a Thomas Hooker and discovering that they shared the same reference entry in the marriage index. I put it down to a combination of luck, intuition and assiduity." Amazing! What tenacity! "We don’t think the James Lovelock in the 1881 census is anything to do with ours. The Henry Lovelock born in Dogmersfield in 1837 is an interesting case which we hope to follow up when we get back to the Family Record Centre. In the surname index for Aldershot there is a Henry Lovelock of the right listed age and supposedly born in the right place." Wonderful! "My wife says that sometime this Summer she will collate all of the GRO stuff she has collected on the Lovelocks (mostly by chance in looking for our specific branch). But be warned, most of it is limited to the Hartley Wintney Registration District." Ah! That answers my question above. I actually have some Lovelocks extracted from the GRO many years ago by my cousin Gwen Eastment ne Lovelock - who got me into this family history stuff! It would be great to see if we could enlist the support of some of the Lovelock reseachers on the list to help extract more. How do you feel about combining what you have with what I have? That would be a great start. Maybe some others will be able to contribute a well. I don't mind typing it into say a spreadsheet format for sharing purposes. Let me know what you think. I'll post this to the Lovelock list as well so that hopefully others will join in. We have so little on Lovelocks in Hampshire other than the IGI. With your assistance, we'll soon have heaps!! Best wishes Robert Sterry WorldWide http://www.zipworld.com.au/~rsterry/gen