Ed wrote about: "...Bessie Ward b.1896 and Celia Ward b. 1898..." Barbara wrote about: "...grandmother...Hendricks...an Iowa Orphan Train Rider... born in Marbletown, NY, in approximately 1893." A resource for finding the exact date of birth is the microfiche series entitled "Copies of selected indexes to birth, marriage, anddeath certificates, 1881-1948" of the New York Dept. of Health, Vital Record Section, numbered B1367. This is arranged by event (b,d,or m), then by year, and then by alphabetically by last name. I am using the description of these 4,612 microfiches in the Excelsior catalog at http://nysl.nysed.gov . That description also states that the birth fiche go only to 1919 and do not include Albany, Buffalo, and Yonkers prior to 1914 or marriages in those cities prior to 1907. Birth indexes do not include original data for adopted infants but the entries that are there provide date and place of event and certificate number. Two sets of the fiche are "available" to the State Archives for research use; I don't know if this means that they can be loaned out via interlibrary loan. The master copy of the index is on the 13th floor Vital Records office in the Cultural Education Center on the state campus in Albany. I used it there a while ago and found a few of my Ulster county ancestors. There are some infants listed only by gender and surname, as that was a practice back then when parents did not have a first name selected at birth. Also, until about 1900 a lot of births, particularly those at home, were not registered. For home births, names, even surnames, were incorrectly provided, often by a doctor, not the parents, weeks after the event. Thus my Mary Bailey is listed as Mary Buehle, mother of Edwin, whose actual name was Edward, for his 1891 birth. Good luck. BTW, Ed, are you related to Carol and Terry Berinato, siblings who lived in Rhinebeck in the 1950s and '60s ? Sharon Carberry Rhinebeck H.S. '68