This may be obvious, but when starting a parish record, don't start at the beginning and copy down everyone with that family name. Find your ancestor first, then work backwards to the parents marriage, which (hopefully) will give ages, then back to their births, etc. You need to do this because you are going to pick up new names with each female ancestor. You should also check at least five years on either side of the expected date in case there were others with the same name. Once I have tracked the main line back to the beginning, I start forward and pick out all the relevant names. I am primarily interested in ancestors and siblings so I don't always record everyone. However, sometimes you have to place everyone in the family tree just to figure out where your people fit. I agree a database (or a table in Word or WordPerfect) is the best way so you can sort on fields. We have ended up with 18 pages on the parish we are looking at. You can sort by family name when you are working on one particular line. It is amazing how families jump out at you when you sort a family name with birth, marriages and deaths in chronological order. Or you can sort by event type if looking for a particular death. Sorting by address can sometimes reveal relationships. I keep the whole thing in one chronological order when looking at the records again so I can quickly see if I have recorded an event of interest. Donna