>So basically what you are telling me is that I'm at the mercy of the   >Maryland State Archives? You're indentured to indefinite service. And you thought you were a customer. Seriously, though, the plats.net problem you face is the chronic confusion attendant to the Archives' indexing practices, coupled with the lack of direct on-line access to the early patent records before 1710. That is to say, it's hard to correlate patents supposedly assigned by the Archives to their modern counties with Certificates of Survey still assigned by them to their orignal counties; and it's even harder if they don't provide you with on-line access to about 25% of all surveys (those for which the Certificates of Survey don't survive, and you have to count on the patents that aren't there.) The system is just incomplete. >I have applied for and received a User ID and password for mdlandrec.   As >fate would have it, the user guide will not load up from the web site.   So I've >tried to navigate (not too successfully) through that web site.   Very >frustrating.  Is it me?  Or does anyone find this particular web  site a bit user >UNfriendly? The User's Guides for both plats.net and mdlandrec.net are pretty sad creatures. I'm not sure if you're better off having them or unable to get to them. The normal way to create a good User's Guide is to involve users; these don't show a lot of evidence that users of what I'll call the genealogically interesting records were ever consulted. While I'll beg off on this one now, there are a couple of other good souls on list who've "tutored" others privately on how to get what you need out of mdlandrec. John