I have for about 2 years been researching a Ratliff family which others have researched for decades and who have now either died or retired, probably due to frustration with this effort. The subject family's earliest known appearance was in Anson County, NC, in the mid to late 1700's. It is not part of the vast Ratcliff group, also in NC in the period, which is represented on the net by Donald Ratcliff in his Ratcliff Family Tree web site. I have read all other Radcliffe, Ratcliff, Ratliff sites and have found nothing to which this family can be connected. Qeries on the various forums, both by surname and by region of the eastern seaboard, have produced nothing. I have spent countless hours in LDS and state genealogy libraries, all to no avail. I have written hundreds of letters and have received hundreds in return. I have obtained copies of every deed or other document which I know to be obtainable in NC and there is no clue as to where this family may have come from. (There is no "family memory" of its origins.) Should I quit? Can any of you offer me any suggestions about how to proceed - what I can do to produce results? A major problem, which, no doubt, all of you have experienced, is the commonality of names. In this Ratliff family are William, James, Elijah, Richard, Samuel, and so on - names duplicated in every other Ratliff family of the period. I hate the idea of expiring in my old age without ever having made a step back from where cousins, now deceased, left off twenty or thirty years ago. I pledge total privacy to anyone with whom I communicate. I will not use the name of any living person in any way except with prior written permission. I will not, under any circumstances, include in my records the names of your ancestors unless we agree that we share same, and I will give credit or attribution to the person or persons who did the research and provided the information. May I expect the same from you? I do this because of some very insensitive people who, I have recently discovered, appear to "stalk" families on the net in order to add, without notice or permission, names of remotely related persons to their vast databases.