Terry and All, It's tough when you only know the state where an ancestor was born or died but there are plenty of online resources to assist you. Below are 3 sites where they offer FREE census record lookups to pinpoint where you ancestors were. Some quite wonderful volunteers are there to assist you. Just read and follow the procedures at each site. Between the 3 sites they have most all census records years/counties available to you. Below below are more sites that may assist you. Rootsweb's Census Central: http://www.rootsweb.com/~uslookup/census.html Ancestral Findings: http://web.mountain.net/~wfmoney/cd/ Genealogy CD List: http://members.tripod.com/~GrannyGrump/cdlist.html Once you get a county name, go to http://www.usgenweb.com/ . USGenWeb has wonderful county genealogical webpages for almost every state in the Union. You can send in Queries, look at databases of cemeteries, marriage records, tax lists, census records and more on most of the county sites. For how to obtain Vital Records state by state and the years available try: http://www.cdc.gov/nchswww/howto/w2w/alphabet.htm#p Also try Cyndi's List at: http://www.cyndislist.com . She had over 30,000 links to every genealogical subject known to man. Hope this helps, Catherine