At 04:51 PM 7/6/98 -0400, John Cramer wrote: >Can any body help Helen? >"Helen McDiarmid" <helenmcd@globalnet.co.uk> >Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 17:10:44 +0100 >From: "Helen McDiarmid" <helenmcd@globalnet.co.uk> >To: Maggie_Ohio-L@rootsweb.com >Message-ID: <01bda766$4c8aa7a0$LocalHost@default> >Subject: FREECE family search in Baltimore >I am looking for information on the family of my father's cousin, he very >much wanted me to trace them for him as he lost touch some years ago. I >should explain that I live in Sussex, England and my father was Welsh, from >Cardiff. His cousins family consisted of Frank FREECE, his wife, >Ethel FREECE nee EVANS and their daughter Eileen FREECE. >I don't have much info but accroding to my grandmother's diary the family >emigrated from Wales in October 1920 and settled in Baltimore, Ohio ... [considerable detail deleted here] >Helen McDiarmid "Helen McDiarmid" <helenmcd@globalnet.co.uk> The folks near Baltimore will be giving better answers and you have already discovered the SSDN, so I'll just throw in a few on-line goodies that spice things up while not necessarily adding much immediate detail :-). I hope these sites are of interest to you (someone presumably unfamiliar with USA resources) as well as to folks just getting started in genealogy on-line: 1. http://www.hamrick.com/names/ is a neat site that can tell you if and where certain last names were common. Enter FREECE and ask about all years and you will find that it was one of the 50,000 most common names in the USA in 1920 but has become much less common since. Oddly, it was only common in Ohio in 1920. Apparently, your Freece family was not the first to go there. Unfortunately, your relative in question is probably not one of those Freeces because he arrived in October of 1920. More unfortunate yet, the 1930 US census won't be released for another four years or so, probably in 2002. 2. Baltimore, as you know, is in Fairfield County, OH. In addition to the Fairfield County mailing list, which you have found, there are two really good web sites for Fairfield County and you can do follow-up research both places: A. The Fairfield County Genealogical Society has their own domain name and site at http://www.fairfieldgenealogy.org/ . They are VERY active and can probably locate a modern-day FREECE for you. Carol Swinehart is one of the most active members and has been extremely helpful to me in the past, but there are no doubt many others as nice as she. B. The Ohio GenWeb site for Fairfield County is at http://www.greenapple.com/~ksmith/que.html where Karen Smith is the volunteer. She, too, is very active and helpful. I did not find any currently posted queries there for the Freece family, so why not be the first? 3. The US telephone directory can be searched at http://www.switchboard.com/bin/cgiqa.dll?MG= for listed people named Freece. There are 68 in the country, only seven of whom are in Ohio now. 4. Searching Yahoo and other engines is a good strategy for very unusual names. Unfortunately, all you might get are a lot of references to Freecell (the game) if you don't also specify genealogy. But using both words turns up six sites through http://www.yahoo.com , none of which appear to be related to your Freece line. (One is actually a typo for GREECE!) Other engines may have different successes. 5. http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/searches/rslsearch.html is the search entry for the Rootsweb surname list. There are two people listed looking for Freece family, one says they came from Germany in 1820 and the other from Wales in 1890. The latter is YOU, Helen! (But it still has your AOL address in it so I hope that address is still valid). So, was it 1890 or 1920? If it was 1890, that means you can look in the 1910 census, and maybe in the 1890 census. (The 1900 census was lost to fire). 6. The Family Tree Maker site can give you a lot of information, even if you don't order the CD's from them. It's at http://www.familytreemaker.com/srchzz.html . It tells you that there is one Ethel in the SSDN, for example, and that there is a family on one of their CD's with an Ethel in Ohio. It may be worthwhile tracking down that one in a library except for the fact that for "Frank Freece", the same page turns up nobody by that name. 7. There are several other sites where you can search a surname list. Most of these sites either sell access to the list or exchange access in return for you providing your data to them. I've never had much luck with those approaches but you may get lucky. Good hunting to you. Dave Crane Houston, Texas