This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/VJIBAEB/28270.1.1.1 Message Board Post: Sure! It was thanks to message boards like this one. Since the convetional methods of looking were getting us nowhere and we had litttle to go on, I started posting messages. I posted on the Smith board, the Dykes board, the California board and a few other remote possibilty boards. I did this here and on Genforum. On the California Genforum board a stranger answered a post with some possible matching birth records for the children. I replied and told her which ones were the correct children. Then she replied again and said that she had a possible match for one of the boys. It was a man with the same first name and middle initial born on the same birthday with a SS# issued in CA. AND she had a possible phone number for him!! (I have no idea how she has this info..I thought maybe better not to ask ;c) ) I figured this was a very good lead. So I had my mother (his 1st cousin) call him. Sure enough it was him! They stayed on the phone for over 1/2 an hour and exchanged info. He was very touched that the family never forgot him and his siblings and kept on looking for them all of these years. He was thrilled to find out that the one person he remembered (his aunt) is still alive! And she was so happy to hear her brother's children had been found, that she cried. We have been gathering pictures to mail to him, his brother and sister and sending them letters trying to tell them about the side of the family the can hardly remember but always knew existed. Now we are all one big family again. Thanks to a random act of kindness. http://genforum.genealogy.com/ca/messages/25922.html