Here's a suggestion for people like Carla Clifton who are trying to find out what happened to an ancestor between 1880 and 1900. The Texas tax rolls are a gold mine for such information. Each county's tax rolls has been microfilmed from the beginning of the county's history. Many libraries - the San Antonio Public Library, for instance - have these microfilmed records. If not, they also are available via interlibrary loan. They are not indexed, as such, but all of the people whose names begin with A are listed together and so on through the alphabet so it is not a trial to find a name. Most years adult males were supposed to pay at least a poll tax. And personal property such as horses, cows, swine, wagons were taxed along with land. Using the tax rolls, I was able to pinpoint the year of one great-grandfather's death because one year he was listed as a taxpayer and the next year his estate was listed as the taxpayer. I also was able to follow him as he shifted back and forth several times between Trinity and Houston counties between censuses. I was able to get close to pinpointing the date of the death of a great-grandmother's first husband, the date of her marriage to the man who was my great-grandfather (a courthouse fire destroyed all records of the era in which they married) and then his death because the name on the tax rolls shifted back and forth between husbands' names and her name. Janey E. Joyce in San Antonio, Texas > > > ------------------------------