ARKANSAS -- 244,456 General Land Office Records to 1908 <http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/arkland/arkland.pl> LOUISIANA -- 126,347 General Land Office Records to 1908 <http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/laland/laland.pl> This came from the Roots Mail list announcements. To encourage you to search them, I found in AR, a record this morning that I believe is my ancestor, and of course, spelled in a way I hadn't checked closely enough for. Caught him red-handed today, maybe! DATABASE HINTS: When you are looking for a particular surname spelling, you have a strong chance of never finding it in a database, but there's a way to fool a database--which only looks for EXACTLY what you type in for a search. You can easily not think of a particular odd spelling, or maybe forget to look for one. Try this when looking into surname searches on a database, instead of a regular surname search. First, only type the FIRST letter of the last name. Then, go through all the alphabet vowel's after that, adding one at a time to the first letter. If you still haven't found it, and think it's probably there, go back and only type the FIRST letter, and let it pull up Every Single First Letter name. This will be a big search, but when it loads up, you can scroll every surname that ever began with that name, and possibly find it, if it's hidden under some odd spelling. Don't get hung on one spelling, the records show names under so many variable spellings, you can hardly ever think of them all. It hinders your finding your people, if you insist on sticking to a name just because OUR family spelled it that way. ( sometime I even begin again and use the most often used reasonable consonant's after the first letter of the name, and they DO turn up that way, too, i.e., Birdwell-Bridwell, which is how I found my man today, right place, right time...If he's mine!) Old hands at database searching, or seasoned genealogy searchers already know this, but newer ones might not, and these are the folks for whom this message is intended. bj, your TXVICTOR-L list manger