Phil, I hope you might contribute the quote to Megan's survey at her website http://www.genetealogy.com/ Some good points. However, more often than not, people "believe" they know their lines based on some family tradition of being related to some prominent family that has no basis in reality. Perhaps a book was located by a prior family researcher that mentioned a Turner with a common name and no documentation and they decided that was their line. I have two of our Spartanburg County, SC Turner lines that earlier researchers claimed were descended from George Turner, listed as a child of Thomas Turner who came from Scituate, MA to VA and NC based on the very skeletal outline in Roskey's book on the Humphrey Turner line. The man who was the source of that original claim--a now deceased lawyer--wrote out a handwritten descendancy which was later widely circulated and was put in a library in Mississippi where it was accessed and then continued to be circulated. Those of us who had researched in records knew that was virtually impossible. But, we continued to fight the battle with those who continued to post that to message boards. We finally got all the Turner lines in Spartanburg documented in the DNA project and in addition got someone from the Humphrey Turner line from Scituate, MA and the DNA has proved conclusively that neither line which believed they were descended from that George of the Humphrey Turner line in Roskey can be. What was even more of a problem was both George Turner of Spartanburg Co. and Henry Turner Sr. of Spartanburg Co. both had sons named Samuel born about the same time. The man who wrote out that descendancy not only attributed his line to the wrong George Turner but he even got the wrong Samuel. How had he done that? He took the George in Roskey and the Samuel listed in Landrum's "History of Spartanburg" and stuck them together. His line turned out to be from Henry Turner Sr. (my line of Turners) and not George Turner of Spartanburg. This also was confirmed by the DNA testing. We were fortunate that the lines in Spartanburg were clearly unrelated because all three had distinctly different haplotypes. Thus, now if anyone does "the checkables" and gets their line of Turners back to Spartanburg Co. and still can't tell which line they belong to, if they do the DNA test, they will know to which one of the three distinct lines in the county they are going to belong in. That is the kind of database that eventually we hope the DNA project will provide. I still believe that actual research into what your quote calls "the checkables" is extremely important. But at what point do you feel you have exhausted those sources--one year, five years, ten years? Most of us who have done genealogy research for many years realize that you find the majority of your information readily if you know what sources to search. Now with the availability of many basic resources on the internet, it doesn't take long to run the cursory checks. The basic principle is always "start with what you know and work backwards." Gail