In support: yep, there's a disturbing trend on the net to sit back and have somebody else do even the simplest work for ya....but it's usually a relatively small group of folks that do it. Okay, some basics here. http://www-nmd.usgs.gov/www/gnis/gnisform.html is your tax dollars at work. Put in the town and state, it'll spit out the county. If it says there's no such place, get a bit creative before asking around---think how you might be misspelling it. At least 50% of the time when I see someone post that GNIS says there's no such place, it's misspelled in fairly obvious ways....for example, say your source says Cuperton, OK, and there's no such place....try Cupertown (still doesn't work) or Cooperton (does work). If you have tried to find the county there, and can't, it helps to say so when you post...it shows you have already tried, and makes the tired old vets far more likely to want to help. Also, if you're doing serious research in a state, you really ought to invest in a decent paper atlas for the state. For Oklahoma, the best ones are The Roads of Oklahoma or Delorme's, which is now available for OK. If you want to order the latter online, check out http://mapstore.delorme.com I'd guess that http://www.amazon.com could get both that and the Roads volume, or any other large online bookstore, like Barnes and Noble or Border Books. You should probably also have a decent road atlas for the whole country....just your basic large Rand McNally works fine. Another problem in many states, and particularly in OK, is assumptions---Assuming that if you're looking for a town that shares its name with a county, that county is where it is. Bad assumption. It works sometimes (Oklahoma City *is* in Oklahoma County, after all), but not in others (Caddo isn't in Caddo County; Kiowa isn't in Kiowa County.) This is just a little *basic* research that folks really ought to be able to do for themselves, online or offline...and sometimes the lack of basic research is mind boggling....when I was SC of Missouri at USGenWeb, I actually had someone tell me that they couldn't look up the county the town was in, because the town wasn't big enough to show up on their map---and what they were looking for was Kansas City! Makes you wonder if the map they were looking on even included Missouri..... megan Vashti wrote: > > Now listen carefully. One of the first things anyone should learn in > geneaology is to KNOW THE COUNTY you are searching in. -- pigolit@ix.netcom.com * cochonnet@aol.com genealogy--http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~piglet quilting--http://pw1.netcom.com/~pigolit/index.htm ICQ: 18429839