geofire37@earthlink.net writes: > my Great Grand Father was born in Ireland-and finally after > three years of doing research- I found him on the new online > census in Illinois so I have gotten that far but still don't know > where he was born Have you looked for naturalization papers for him? This is what he would have filed to become a U.S. citizen. I found such papers for my own 2nd-great-grandfather, and they established which county he came from in Ireland. I believe these are held at the county level (i.e. the U.S. county where he lived and became naturalized) for records through the 1800s; sometime in the 1900s they began being held by the federal government. Frank