Records are certainly only as good as the persons who make them. It took me almost 50 years, 20 of which I was actively searching, to find my birth family. In the past three years I have found a lot of information on my maternal grandfather but not where he is buried. I finally found a death record for his sister but the coroner's informant was a neighbor who did not know anything about the poor woman's relatives so the D.C. is useless in making family connections. I've been tracing my adoptive family from Virginia for much longer and I have discovered that in past decades, people did not tell people information they considered none of their business. We know that one of my grandfather's sisters gave birth to a child (my dad's first cousin) out of wedlock. Later she married a distant cousin who shared her last name and he is listed on dad's cousin's D.C. as the father even though everyone in the family knew better. Then there is the legacy of Virginia's discrimination against persons of Native American descent. Some branches of my adoptive family can document their tribal ancestry but within that same group, some went to great lengths to hide it over the years. Not only is all this "root-diggin" fascinating in its own right, but it also gives us an insight into American history that we would not have otherwise. Ann