Hi Judy, > I don't know if anyone ever answered the question about what > county Altoona is in, but it looks like Blair Co. > Judy in GA Sorry, not all my responses go through the list. That old axiom about giving a person a fish or teaching the person how to fish holds true here. If you have full internet access and can use a browser to view data on the World Wide Web, try this address to the Geographic Names Information Service offered by the United States Geological Survey, a part of the U. S. Department of the Interior. http://mapping.usgs.gov/www/gnis/gnisform.html At this site, you can enter the name of a city, borough, town or village and find out what state and county it's in. Sometimes there will be multiple results because the place exists in several places. For instance, in addition to the Altoona in Blair County, Pennsylvania, it's a populated place in each of the following: Etowah County, Alabama Lake County, Florida Polk County, Iowa Wilson County, Kansas Madison Parish, Louisiana Jackson County, Ohio Wahkiakum County, Washington Eau Claire County, Wisconsin It will also help find some cemeteries, but not all of them are listed with GNIS, particularly not the small private or family cemeteries. I think it's a terrific tool. Many obituaries throw place names around as if every reader will automatically know where that place is. This web site helps narrow down the possibilities. The alternative would be to buy a gazetteer for each state of interest. I highly recommend that you add this site to your Favorites, bookmark it, or whatever your browser calls the act of saving an address so you can easily navigate back to this wonderfully useful site. Oh, if you're copying a name from a word processing document to paste into any of the fields on the query form, any trailing space can limit your results. Good hunting! Carey Chilcote -- Researching Chilcote/Chilcoat and related Booher, David, Fleck, Harris, Rutter, Smith and others...