Hi, All. FreeFind, which created the search engine on the Sumner County page, sends me a weekly search report on what terms are being used to search the site. Because of what I found, I thought a little reminder of how this particular search engine works might be in order. By default the search engine tries to locate pages which have EXACT matches for all of the words entered in your search query. If that fails, it then tries to locate pages which contain any words in your search query. For instance, if you type in Russel with 1 "l", it will NOT find Russell with 2 "l"s. If you type in Russell Kelley, it will look for Russell Kelley first, then Russell, then Kelley. It will NOT find Russel Kelly. So, one suggestion is that you use as little of the word as you can and add a wildcard. You can always add more letters to the search term if you get too many results. There are a couple of different wildcards that you can use: * If you type in the first few letters (for instance, rus) and then an *, the search engine will find everything STARTING with rus. ? If you type in the one or more letters of the word (for instance, again, rus) and one or more ?s, it will behave very differently: ?rus will find everything ending in rus ?rus? will find everything that has rus somewhere in the middle rus? acts like rus* and finds everything starting with rus A second suggestion is that, because the name might have been misspelled or transcribed incorrectly, try as many alternatives as you can think of. For instance McMillan may be entered as Mc Millan or Macmillan or.... One of the surnames I have is HOISINGTON and I have found at least 37 different spellings for Hoisingtons, sometimes in the same family. I keep a list of the variant spellings when I'm searching and try all the more common variants and as many of the others as I have time for. Third, if you STILL can't find it, contact me or one of the volunteers on the Lookup page. We have material that is not on the web site that we would be happy to check. Harriette Jensen Host, USGenWeb site for Kay County, OK http://www.rootsweb.com/~okkay/okkay.htm