A couple years ago I was where you are now. Chin up, it gets a little easier every time you do a search someplace. Aside from older family members' memory and possibly a family bible, I'd suggest you go to the Rowan County courthouse and the genealogical library in Salisbury and run searches on births, deaths, cemeteries, tax lists, and census lists (began in 1790). If you know your family's religious affiliation, many churches maintain old records of members. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has a web page that has a fantastic collection of genealogy information. There are a jillion sites on the internet to search and surname lists are quite prevalent. You just have to pull up a chair and dig in. You might even find someone who has already done a lot of research on your family name and just waiting for someone out there to contact them with the same interest. It has happened! Check web pages that might show your names, leading you to new sources. This Rowan Roots page is very good, especially if your ancestors came from there. I've been keeping in touch with it, although my main interests have been in Davidson County, right next door. But Davidson was formed out of old Rowan [as well as many other counties], so in order to find out if you might need to go to some of these other counties, why not check in with the NC genealogical page and search all counties at one time for the surname(s) you're interested in? If you know how the people got to NC (example: many came to the Yadkin River valley in Rowan County down the Old Wagon Trail that began up in the Lancaster County area of PA), you might want to work back to the known source area and the states they went through. Some dropped off along the way and some of these came on down later. Happy hunting, Bert Simerson