I appreciate the novice advice, but I have for some of the places, but I haven't had the money yet to buy the census cd for Grand Traverse County yet. I was hoping someone there might help with some of the "local" search first. Because I don't know when I'll be able to travel to the county to look up stuff at the library microfilm. Living in Mississippi it is kind of hard to do that and when I do go visit my mother she lives in Menasha, Wisconsin and if you look at the map that is still too far away to make a day trip to the library or even if I went to Marquette, Mi. the same thing holds there as well. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have two children 4 yr. and 18 months that I had to be back to in a day! Kim "J.M. (Jay) Ingalls" wrote: > Kim, > > You need to do one of the most important things in genealogy research: Look > at all Federal and State Census records for the places your families lived! > Especially 1850-1920. In two more years, the 1930 census will be available. > The 1890 census burned, but some of the data is available from other > sources. > > Do not use just the Census index, read the actual census pages. Indexes are > often wrong or missed people. > > Jay