Dr Bill wrote..... >>Roy, I do not claim to be as knowledgeable as you in the area of genealogy but I think you should "lighten up" <grin> In my lexicon, the word estimate is to guess at a number which will narrow, somewhat, the area in which you are looking. vis-a-vis if I estimate that Joe was 25 at the time of his marriage to Josie (18), I now can begin my search for documentation in a much narrower time frame. If such documentation is not forthcoming, then I widen the time frame perhaps 5 years at a time.<< I think perhaps you misunderstand me. I have no problem with the principle of "educated guesses" as long as it is used strictly as a starting point in a search - fine. What does concern me is that the LDS Church apparently goes rather further than this and instructs members to use the "deduct 25 or 21 years from a marriage to get the birth date" as part of its ordinances programme. I have been told by others that ordinances cannot be done unless there is a birth date (no doubt if there are any members of the LDS Church on this list they will correct me if I am wrong) which surely encourages submitting members to invent them. Hence, we have umpteen totally bogus "about" birth dates on the IGI which are utterly misleading to those newcomers who have not learnt their way around the system. I think there is a division, perhaps, between what the LDS uses genealogy for and how we, non-members, view it. Let's remember that the vast majority of visitors to the FamilySearch site will be non-LDS and many will be newcomers who will follow faithfully the advice they find there. >>I further recognize that the Brits are much further along in the science of Genealogy.....having not much else to do in the past thousand or so years<< What - apart from conquering a quarter of the world, fighting wars against the French, Spanish, Dutch, Germans and sundry other nations, bringing civilisation to the natives wherever we went and populating America, you mean??? At least we know how to run an election that gets a result on the same day and doesn't require an army of grossly over-paid lawyers to decide it! <b.g.> Roy Stockdill Editor, The Journal of One-Name Studies The Stockdill Family History Society (Guild of One-Name Studies, FedFHS) STOCKDILL PREST YELLOW BOLTON WORSNOP GIBSON MIDGLEY BRACEWELL SHACKLETON BRADLEY MOODY in Yorkshire North & West Ridings MEAD YOUNG in Somerset, Wiltshire & Gloucestershire Web page of the Stockdill Family History Society:- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roystock Web page of the Guild of One-Name Studies:- http://www.one-name.org ”Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does he will tell you. If he does not, why humiliate him?" - Canon Sydney Smith (scholar and humorist 1771-1845)