I believe I sent you the entire file I had offered to share. It was identified as "Emigrants to Pennsylvania". If you didn't get it, please let me know. Tom Aiken Virginia Beach

I am sorry, I should have written to you. Yes, I did get it and I do thank you. My back has been giving me problems and I have not been doing the E-Mail on a regular bases. Please forgive me. and it was helpful to some extent. Our family genealogy is well documented since the arrival in this country/ --------------------------------- Don't be flakey. Get Yahoo! Mail for Mobile and always stay connected to friends.

Doing a good deed By JENNA PORTNOY The Intelligencer Billy Penn would be proud.Documentation of his distribution of land to early Bucks Countians — along with 7 million other county property records — will soon be preserved on high-quality CDs and then microfilm. “This investment in the past is going to be beneficial for a long time into the future,” recorder of deeds Edward Gudknecht said, standing among records dating from 1684 to 1988. “Just the preservation itself shows a great respect for our past history,” said Ed Ludwig, who is president and CEO of the Doylestown Historical Society and a U.S. District Court judge in Philadelphia. “That kind of continuity is important.” While title searchers and real estate agents often refer to these records, the irreplaceable documents are of particular interest to genealogists and historians. “In California, to them history means something that happened before 1880,” Ludwig joked. “Of course, when you compare us with the U.K. it makes us look like we're in diapers too.” Although what makes something historical is often relative, Bucks' past coincides with the birth of the nation. Books of documents, piled floor to ceiling in the county's warehouse at the Neshaminy Manor Center in Doylestown Township, do not include actual deeds, mortgages and property transfers, which get returned to the homeowner or bank, but indexes of those documents that already exist on microfilm. Although the film is said to last 100 years, Gudknecht said it's deteriorating and difficult to read. Thanks to a state act, his office finally has the cash needed to reproduce the pages on more durable technology. The Records Improvement Fund was amended in 2002 to give the recorder of deeds office the authority to tack $5 onto its fees. For each document recorded, $2 goes to other county offices and the remaining $3 is set aside for Gudknecht's office's use. A $660,000 contract to complete the two-year-long project was expected to go to Foveonics Imaging Tech of Eatontown, N.J.; the company also holds the county contract to put newly recorded documents on microfilm. County commissioners were slated to approve the contract on Feb. 7, but due to concerns the lowest bidder, DMI Forms of New Castle, Del., had over its application, the matter was postponed. DMI Forms said it could do the work for about $375,000, but the county said the company was eliminated because it did not provide enough in-state recorders of deed references and would have removed documents from the warehouse — a no-no, according to the bid specifications. Bill Swezey, DMI's vice president, said in a phone interview his company could do the work in the warehouse. Bucks' first deputy recorder Bob Dickson said some of the documents are so fragile just handling them for scanning purposes could cause the paper to breakdown even further. In some cases the lending banks are long-defunct and the papers represent the only proof that many mortgages were paid off. “If anything ever happens to these books, hundreds of thousands of mortgages would be open again,” he said. “That's why this job is so critical.” Jenna Portnoy can be reached at (215) 345-3060 or [email protected] February 17, 2007 8:20 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________________________________________ Check out the new AOL. Most comprehensive set of free safety and security tools, free access to millions of high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL Mail and more.