RE: Order of accuracy of Washington County RI genealogical sources, May I thank everyone for their contributions to the list to date on this subject? To me, at least, the collective wisdom from experience which is apparent behind the responses...truly delights and amazes me...the "common sense" behind some of them impresses me after the fact(why didn't I think of that one!)...but I take these observations to be the happy result of some years of experience at this work...thank you, thank you, thank you! I was just wondering if others out there shared any of my frustrations...for example, I am....miles away from town records, so don't have the opportunity to dig up primary data as I would like. Further....just as I find that the data I massage...takes a differing direction as it evolves...and as I learn, bit by bit...better ways to do this work....I find that my perception of what records are more important than others, and how they might rank...changes imperceptibly but steadily as well...and so I find myself with revision work...which, if I knew better what I was doing when I started...or had learned from others' experiences...would not be necessary...revision work which keeps me from helping myself and others with more primary research... But most of all...I...can't help thinking that...in this age of the internet and relational databases, that all of this work could be done so much more easily....for all of us...by all of us...if there were in one place, an...evolving...standard of genealogical records accuracy...a..."grid", if you will, which...we could all "hang our hat on", so to speak, sort of like...the established rules for footnoting and bibliography citing for research dissertations...so that we all could begin to contribute to a centralized database...the combined compilation and accessibility of which would benefit everyone...and one which would be flexible enough to have its entries modified at any future point where...better primary information corrects a prior entry... (I also see a point where...regional histories and public records accounts are transcribed on database so that we can not only build from the first database a gencom of (our own) lines that we are researching, but also correlate our uplines to the historical events which shaped their lives, and by extension, gives ours a profounder sense of...meaning. As I mentioned recently at the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society, I can't help envisioning a time when we can use database tools to....personalize....local Washington County history...by not only generating a personalized upline for any visitor whose ancestors lived here...an upline record which includes the individuals from whom one descends, but also lists what they DID, and how their lives relate to the events which transpired here. (A fifth grader, for example, might conceivably be pretty bored with the topic of the second Continental Congress...but would she/he not be more excited about it if he/she knew that their x-great uncle was a delegate...and further knew the local circumstances under which he was appointed? Wouldn't U. S. history be much more meaningful..."real" to him/her, if such a personal family connection can/could be shown?) This second possibility could be the happy result if volunteers were not only to help transcribe primary local genealogical records, but also the pages and pages of worn, dusty documents of local history of limited accessibility...onto a searchable database---imagine for example running a search function for any given local individual in your upline, or in the upline you are researching, and getting...almost immediately...every local newspaper entry...every vital statistics record....every probate court record...every local church record....every private journal...every family bible transcription conceivably available ...of that person, in one search data stream? Does such a goal seem useful to anyone else? Does it seem possible? Would any one of us contribute to it by transcription voluntarily, if a workable "shell" was set up for it on-line? Appreciatively, as always, Barry Hale Browning P.S. If you will all give me a bit of time to do it, may I attempt to make a short compilation of everyone's suggestions to date?