some great info Bill!!.....I'm in the process now of searching my first set of LDS microfilm church records for the Nizna Mysla / Balogd / Garbocz areas of Slovakia near Kosice....it's a lot easier than i thought it would be.....since my ancestry apparently has been in this area for centuries the 200 years of records are amazing......did the cherry picking thing too where i started with what i knew.....verified it and taking the names of the parents on baptism record (including mother's maiden name!!)..skipped twenty or so years back and found the parents baptism records and so on......wanting to get all the surnames of the ancestors and will then go through the entire records once i know what the surnames are and jot down names and dates of these surnames and goal is to put together all the relatives in my database.....with the limited times the LDS in my area is open, i am sure that i will have to rent the films indefinitely....only problem i have found so far is that when you are dealing with common Slovak surnames there are sometimes two children baptized within a few years of each other with the 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.....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??....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....only problem is i am not sure how i would spell the surnames using these letters.....maybe you can talk me through it.....surnames are BASARA and BJELIVUK......figured out the BASARA i think.....it looks sort of like Bacapa??.....not sure on the other one....thanks...Joe

to get all the surnames of the ancestors and will then go through the entire > records once i know what the surnames are and jot down names and dates of > these surnames and goal is to put together all the relatives in my > database.....with the limited times the LDS in my area is open, i am sure > that i will have to rent the films indefinitely....only problem i have found > so far is that when you are dealing with common Slovak surnames there are > sometimes two children baptized within a few years of each other with the > same given and surname with different parents and same town of birth..... This is exactly what I've been doing for about 4 years. I go over them again and again, sometimes picking up something I've missed. But you are so right about common names. I'm dead-ended at one of my ancestors, Andrew Kolesar. There are FOUR Andrew Kolesar's born within a very short time-frame. All of them married Susanna's! There's absolutely no way to figure out which one is my ancestor. Lorrie