This was posted on another list by John M OMelia. He has given me permission to pass it on. I found it very helpful hope you do also. Gladys ts landing in NYC before 1892 from foreign lands would stay in the harbour aboard ships until the Master of the ship gave a manifest of his passengers to the NY port authority. If the ship arrived during the weekend the passengers would stay on board sick or not until the Monday though Friday hours of the port authority was open for business. New York City nor New York State were paying folks to work the weekends. After the port authority received the Master declaration of his manifest stating the names of his passengers there was the need to make copies of the said manifest for the records of NYC and for the Federal District Court in NYC. The federal court would make copies of the same manifest to forward to Washington. Each time a new entity would receive a copy of the manifest more copies were made for each succeeding authority thought it needed a copy. This is basically the same system used in regard to the federal census taking. The census taker had his territory to make his copy which was combined into another copy prepared by the chief of the team which is combined with others to form the first copy of the Marshall. The Marshall prepares three copies for one to the county of the census, one for the state, and one for the federal court as agent of the federal government. Can you see the paper trail here?? Ever so often you read where someone has found census sheets that were supposed to be lost of the lost due to fires, floods, and plain old carelessness. You will find that where the boat landed with the immigrant there is paper generated with data. It will be in libraries that would rather not go public due to delicate age of the material. Luckily over the years someone has taken the bull by the horns and transcribed the data and published it. As time has passed and the works have been made you can see the patterns of local and federal government and their need for records.(g) Where we in genealogy see and feel the pain is the careless indifferent attitude of those who are supposed to store and file these records. Acts of God are not part of the problem compared to the acts of man. Do not give up looking for the records. There is always a paper trail to follow. Always. No matter what year you are looking at for your research. You find yourself against a brick wall or in a deep pit on your BROWNS or SMITH. You find yourself look at a mole hill and it looks like a mountain. Then take a look at those MOORE relatives of those BROWN`s and SMITH`s and you may be surprised to see something in the MOORE family data that mentions the others. Why did you find those BROWN`s and SMITH`s listed with your MOORE line. Because the county lines moved to create another county in which all of the families are in and they are all not in the original county you thought they would be in. Too many times you will find a relative in another county each census year and they never moved an inch.(G)