Joe, you wrote a lot, my comments are preceded by a "-" Bill only problem i have found same given and surname with different parents and same town of birth.....and even checking the marriage record to get the parents names, sometimes the records don't show the parents names if they are before 1850 it seems. - This may be peculiar to the scribe doing the writing. In my tiny villages the priest recorded the parents names well back into the 1700s. ....the marriage records do show the age of the person marrying but sometimes that doesn't help...one case i had had the woman aged 19 marrying and i found a baptismal record for two of the same named folk one who would have been 18 upon marriage and one who would have been 20 using this marriage date....should i assume the gal would round up or round down her age??....any ideas??.... - This is a classic problem in small villages, we all face it. A limited set of surnames and given names in use. Back then, most people had "nicknames" to distingush them. Alas, they are all lost. - You can't assume the girls rounded up or down. Although it is true people forgot their ages, this did happen mostly as they aged, since birthday celebrations did not generally occur. At this young age, the ages stated for marriage were pretty much accurate in my experience (never say never, there is always an exception.) - I have to leave this one up to your own invention. Don't be quick to make assumptions like this. It can lead to an erroneous family tree which becomes unweildly to understand and work with. As a general rule, leave these names out (or document them clearly as questionable) UNTIL you have corroborative evidence to support your claim. - Sometimes circumstantial evidence is useful. On particularly thorny issues, you may have to inspect other surname records. Remember, in small villages everyone knew everyone. Looking for an individual who was a marriage or baptismal sponsor. Look for patterns among these names. They may have been family friends. Make a complete timeline of birth-marriage-death not only for the people in question, but for their parents, siblings, their children. Look for clues within each of these records. - Girls typically married about age 18, men around 22 (military service got in the way). Girls getting married any older than about 22-24 were considered "old maids". Men also married right away and both remarried right away. Marriage for "Love" as we know it today was irrelevant, marriage was a practical matter and the pressure to marry for utility was enormous. thanks Bill for the website for the Cyrillic alphabet....also rented a microfilm for ancestors in Croatia and it is in Cyrillic.....couldn't make heads or tales of it.....this website should help.... - What I cited are Slavonic characters. You can find the true Cyrillic characters here: http://www.colby.edu/library/collections/technical_services/wp/Cyrillic. html - printed http://www.ia.net/~jcarroll/privet/script.html - script only problem is i am not sure how i would spell the surnames using these letters.....maybe you can talk me through it... - Sorry, I don't have the cycles to do this - you have the tools now, give it the old college try! Good Luck, Bill