It's fairly likely that your Irish (or Italian or Polish...) family has been using the same funeral home for years, possibly for generations. If so, you may have an excellent information source just a postage stamp away. When I wrote a letter to "our" funeral home, asking for information on several names -- ya gotta be specific here! -- I got back a dozen or more photocopies of index cards the funeral home had kept. And they didn't even take me up on my offer to pay! Thanks to these cards, I *finally* got a lead on my g-grandfather Michael Hartigan's parents, along with cause-of-death and burial information that I would not have found elsewhere. I even know who paid for the funerals and who drove the funeral cars! This is not exactly primary research, so it's stuff I still need to verify elsewhere, including getting death certificates and such. Still, I only have to look in a smaller universe of records. Bonus: I plan to scan these copies and include them in my research files. Best part: even though this is the so-called Irish funeral home, my Sicilian grandmother was so impressed by one of the family funerals she attended there, she arranged to have her husband buried from here, and we later buried her from that home as well. That means I got information on the other side of the family as well. -- --- Richard Danca Newton, MA rdanca@gmail.com ------