There were 146,425 persons with Thomas surname on the 1880 US census. But, that's probably only about 30- or 40,000 households. Ahhh the power of computers! Some posts recently reminded me of a project I'd participated in for surname SACKETT. Parts of it are applicable to THOMAS. We chose the 1880 US census since it is every-person indexed. Those of us who participated own the 50-cd 1880 census index. We broke it up into states and other divisions. Each person made a list of every sackett surname in their section. For Sacket, we also chose any given name with Sacket/sackett in it (the program looks at any close spellings automagically.) Thomas alas would have to settle for surname only. OK, there was a project director to whom we sent all these lists to, email. The 1880 has lots of info, and to find where everly last Thomas in the US was at that particular time was a great building project. Again, it takes a web page to access. The web page was made searchable. You could select what seems most important, name of course, or by state-county-town. I don't recall if by age, but why not! I don't know what it would take to code for a bracketed age-in-1880 though, because that one's not always so easy to get exact. Would you believe, the few of us participating submitted the whole project in one week. Now the bad part - the project manager had to do all the real work. All us volunteers had to do was sort, copy, paste. Gah - it sounds like grad student imperative: publish publish publish. I don't have a Sackett though so I didn't see through to the end of the program. Kaye in Texas PS There were 403 persons with the given name Elvis in 1880 US. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com