I wrote..... > But did anyone bother to explain to Bill how FreeBMD works, where the > censuses are to be found and how to find out which places were in a particular registration > district, also that Mansfield RD crossed the county border between Nottinghamshire and > Derbyshire? I happen to think that these things should be explained to beginners in family > history, otherwise how will they learn how to research for themselves?< There's an old Eskimo saying (or maybe it's Chinese, I'm not sure) that goes something like this: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him HOW to fish and you feed him for the rest of his life." Applied to genealogy and family history, this makes a good deal of sense to me. It isn't sufficient just to send people information from FreeBMD, the census returns and other sources etc. It's the duty of we advanced genealogists, in my book, to teach newcomers how these sources and programs work. With FreeBMD, for instance, I happen to think it is vital always to look at the additional pages telling you what places are found in a particular registration district, when they were taken into that RD and also when they were moved to a different district, as so many changes have taken place in registration districts since civil registration came in in 1837. You need to know also where places are and if I am not familiar with a particular area I happen to be researching in, the very first thing I do is look it up with Google, find the appropriate maps, etc. because if you can't find an event in one parish very often it can be located in a contiguous (adjacent) parish. Likewise with the census returns, I know lots of little tricks to find people who don't want to be found! Quite often I can find difficult subjects by omitting the surname from the search, entering only a forename, approximate birth year and a place, then trawling through what is often a lengthy list of possibles that comes up. Usually the subject is "hiding" in a garbled version of the name which has been badly transcribed - Ancestry is especially prone to this, though Nivard won't agree with me! I have even on the odd occasion found someone masquerading under a different name but the forename(s), age and birthplace fit the facts. It's worth remembering that people often told fibs to the census enumerator, especially if they thought somebody was looking for them and they didn't want to be found! There are lots of techniques that we experienced researchers employ and I am always happy to pass these on to beginners and newcomers to family history. As the saying goes, it's like teaching a man how to fish instead of just giving him food which in the long run doesn't benefit him at all. -- Roy Stockdill Genealogical researcher, writer & lecturer Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History: www.genuki.org.uk/gs/Newbie.html "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE