Dear Folks, This afternoon when Valerie and her family were here in my house, one of them spotted the pictures I have on my wall of my ancestors. They were fascinated how I had them arranged. I marched them through the generations starting with my Housman/Bryan grandparents. When I pointed out the picture of my great-great grandmother Anna Fishel (1840-1919), I noticed how I had labeled her picture. It said that her name was Anna Frances Fishel who married Samuel Schroll. My sister Norma and I had always referred to her as Anna Frances but one day I checked my family group sheets and nowhere could I find any source notes that told me how we came to the conclusion that her middle name was Frances. I called it to Norma's attention and she didn't know how we came to that conclusion either. As a result, we got down to the basics and decided that the next time we visited her grave we would check to see what the inscription read. The first opportunity we got, we visited her grave and what we read on her tombstone was "Anna F. Schroll." Right then and there we figured out that we had assumed was that the "F" was her middle name, whereas the "F" stood for Fishel. We were so embarrassed that we had jumped to conclusions without recording our source. During our many years of genealogy research, we always copied down the inscriptions of tombstones and recorded the information in our records. But there came a time when one of us asked the other how we came to the conclusion regarding the date of birth. We studied our notes and finally came to the conclusion that we had figured out that the date of birth came from a simple math formula from the tombstone. Such as someone died in 1814, for instance, and the inscription read that he was 64 yr 10 mo 5 da. That comes out to his birth year of ca 1750. When we realized that, we made certain that our conclusion was based only upon the tombstone inscription. In other words, we couldn't carve it in stone, as it were. As Valerie studied my Clapsaddle family group sheets (in primitive form) today she noticed how I had color coded the information I had on the family. Regarding the information of the parents and children, I inserted their approximate date of birth according to the census records I have. With that piece of information, I made a colored dot alongside and at the bottom right side of the sheet, I put the same colored dot which indicated the date of the census. And every other piece of information I dug up on the family I did the same thing. Colored dots on the family's name, date of birth, date of death and where I got the information from. I invented the system by myself and it's held me in good stead ever since. The bottom line is this. If you record any bit of information about an ancestor or a family and don't know where you found the information, you're left with only some sort of myth. But hey, if you got the information from Aunt Mathilda, record the source and from there you can consider whether you should take it with a grain of salt. vee