I have been doing some research on the Ellis Island Site (www.ellisisland.org). Admittedly this has been for Greek relatives. However, the other complexity is the record keeping that takes place when people arrived in new countries and the changes made to their names - sometimes as a result of the person taking down the record being unfamiliar with the name, place, etc and other times with them determining that the Greek form of the name was actually an English name (eg Georgios became George) !!! Another issue is that when people, who are not literate in their own language ,are asked questions, they could answer with the 'wrong' answer - eg place of birth, date of birth, place of residence, father's name, mother's maiden name etc. In PNG dates of birth are so irrelevant - that the question for 'how old are you?' is 'Hamas kristmas bilong yu? And even then - it is an estimate for many people. Birth certificates are a new form of documentation. In Greece, the date of brth could be the date of the actual birth of the date that the person's birth was registered. Yet another issue is the transcribing of the handwritten records - I have noted that there are sometimes changes in ages from one record to another and it is clear that the handwritten age is perhaps 23 - and is then transcribed as 21. One wonders how that takes place - but if this is all done in bulk - then there will always be human error. It requires an open mind and a preparedness to search beyond the predictable records. In my early stages of this hobby - I was obsessed by spelling of a name and did not realise that there would be variations on the spelling over time and even within the one generation and the issue about the spelling of Mac and Mc is a case in point. We have relatives whose names are Broggreff and there are more spellings of that name than you can imagine. Many challenges, Regards to all and all the best for 2007, Libby McMillan