Bonnie, The same can be said for any index -- the original handwriting has to be interpreted and sometimes it gets mangled by those not already familiar with the family. What is great about the 1880 everyname census is all the creative ways you can search -- with wildcards, first names, by county, by state or the whole US in one search. If you know the names of their neighbors you can search for them and then look at the neighbors. You mentioned a way of searching - by an unusual first name - that cannot be done using the 1880 soundex that is indexed by head of household for only those households with children under the age of 10. If only all the other census indexes were created the same as the 1880! Rebecca In a message dated 8/23/01 5:11:56 PM Central Daylight Time, brs1@mediaone.net writes: << Word of warning on the 1880 census from LDS - I purchased my own copy of the CD set, and tried to look up a family I had already located, as a test of the index. It took some doing to find them on the CD. I had to resort to searching for a given name in the family that was unusual, without the surname, which was so badly misread I never would have found it in their index. This happened in varying degrees with a few surnames I searched for. So, if you don't locate your family immediately on the CD's, be very, very creative with your search of the index. Bonnie >>