A comment about the moves of folks from VA and PA... It will really help to narrow down those dates. There was a time that parts of what today is Pennsylvania was claimed by Virginia prior to the Revolutionary War. The sections that were in contention are around what is today's Pittsburgh and Westmoreland County, PA and down towards the border between the two states. Some of those records can be found in Pennsylvania at mostly the county levels...The Penns ylvania State Archives are a mess and very hard to find much of anything. I was there this summer and have to say it is the worst excuse for an archives that I have ever been to and I really feel for anyone having to deal with that system. The help from the staff is extremely limited, if any. In order to find anything you much go from one set of files to yet another and then to one or three microfilms only to find out the documents you need are really at the county levels anyway. It was utter frustration to find anything. However, the folks at the Westmoreland County courthouse were wonderful, helpful and easy to work with. I don't know how many of those records might have remained in Virginia with the transfer of land between the states. You might try to narrow down when your branch of the Ragan tree was in either PA or VA. As to Kentucky and the move there. That seems to have been a common direction for many to do, in part because of the Ohio River that runs between PA and KY. My William McGinnis from Westmoreland County made that move and once in KY became for a while a "river" man. He took canal boats and other boats with goods up and down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, sometimes all the way to New Orleans, LA. In his letters he wrote about this endeavor he reported that they would dump the boats at New Orleans and then come back via horse back or walking, noting the trip was fraught with danger because of armed robbers seeking money or anything else they could lay their hands on that many a good man had died trying to make his way back up to KY or PA from LA. So that is something to think about. Cheryl Joseph Wesley Ragan, b. NC d. AR, m. TN early 1800's. ************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com