Absolutely. One's understanding of the relationships in a surname and one's knowledge of the local geography in Germany improve as one gathers information. Go back over old steps and things will leap out at you. Key is to collect people of your surname that you don't think are related, and save the source (citation) where you found it. I was looking for my great grandfather's birthplace in Germany and met only brick walls, "no one by that first name christened in this church or that church", etc. I did find a person by the same surname and followed his information back to Germany because he left more information on his children's birth certificates. But the information did not make any sense. And, 'they' said "no relation". After much time, and looking at a map of that area of Germany in 1883 and now, the picture became clearer. My great grandfather was born near the confluence of three German states where the boundaries changed over a century. The tree is now extended to my great, great grandfather, including a photo taken in 1880 of him, from a living member of the surname in that area, linked to only through my great uncle's name, someone I did not know to be an uncle. A big problem for me has been that the 1918 flu pandemic wiped out my grandparents when the kids were small. No one to pass the information to my generation. i will not repeat that misfortune with my negligence. My descendants will know where they came from. On the other hand, I have this suspicion that the information we find so difficult to access, will be in searchable databases in the future. What takes us years now will take them hours. But, they have to know whom to look for. By the way, because of the area they were from in Germany, I have had to track the Westfalen, Niedersachsen and other lists, although the resulting place of birth of my great grandfather was in what is now Sachsen-Anhalt but was then Thüringen. His brother's was in extreme Eastern Westfalen, and their ancestors in the part of Sachsen-Anhalt which was then Sachsen. Those folks got around! - michael On Oct 20, 2005, at 10:00 PM, NIEDERSACHSEN-D-request@rootsweb.com wrote: > From: mstulken@wi.net > Date: October 20, 2005 3:19:10 PM CDT > To: NIEDERSACHSEN-L@rootsweb.com > Subject: Re: [NIEDERSACHSEN] Re: Once in a while, you might get lucky > > when doing computer searches, don't hesitate to retrace > your steps over and over because things "out there" keep changing. > > Marilyn in Wisconsin >