I am ROFL!!! That is html code which was not properly written to begin with. It should have come out as an apostrophe! Any time you see something strange starting with an ampersand and ending with a semicolon, it is probably supposed to be a punctuation mark, but was coded wrong. People have to put special codes in, instead of the actual marks, because sometimes the punctuation messes up urls. I don't know why it was used in the email, where it should not have been necessary. I would guess it's another example of how various text editors can mess up the results. Windows editors and browsers are notorious for doing lots of wierd things to text, especially WordPad and MS Word. On 1/1/09, carolt71 <[email protected]> wrote: > The numbers are in the paragraphs beginning with records. The number is > 8217. > Carol > ----- Original Message ----- > From: <[email protected]> >> Security card applications, church and civil marriage records, >> children’s records of birth, death certificates, obituaries,