Irene and all, I think we all suffer from not knowing enough about other country's geography. The two letter abbreviations for that states are not necessarily used universally internationally. American's are taught geography rather in a self-centered way; we often don't know where some of the Canadian provinces or the English references are. I don't know for sure where to get a listing of the states abbreviations, Irene, but on our Lovelxxx web site, there is a map with the two letter abbreviations with the state spelled out in full below. The address is: http://www.iredell.net/us_map.htm. You can click on one or the other to find the corresponding reference. We don't have any international listings yet, though. Nova Scotia is in Canada. I'm not as familiar with Canadian cities and provinces, but those should be fairly easy to obtain from an atlas or even encyclopedia reference. It might help us here in our posts to spell out more specifically the locations of our references since we're all so geographically diverse. Please note that Rootsweb is working on their servers this weekend and that our web site might be difficult to access for a couple days. Stop back to check it out, though! W. [email protected] Publisher of Lovelace Legacy newsletter Lovelxxx web page: http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~lovelace Earliest Lovelxxx ancestor: Stephen H. Loveless born MD 1794/96 died Coshocton Cty., OH