Dear Smith - and other common name researchers (and I bet you have some) Some tips I have learned while trying to scale brick walls: I was trying to separate out/sort out two men who had Rev War service. They had rather unusual first and last names, but, darn it, they lived in adjoining counties in North Carolina. I happened to be in Washington, DC and wandered into the DAR Library to seek help with this problem. The Library was nearly empty, and I reported my problem. I was directed to a staff genealogist, as I was trying to help a prospective member find the right ancestor--a new ancestor. The genealogist told me: 1. Find out who were the associates of each man. That was rather easy because I had a list of all the spouses whom the children of the patriot had married, and that caused me to round up some suspicious characters with those surnames. In other cases, I have noted the neighbors (generally named in deeds), bondsmen for marriages or other bonds, administrators of estates, sons-in-law as named in wills or deeds, and so on. A cousin tells me he traced a common-named family by the name of one of the slaves!!! 2. Find out on what watercourse each man was located. For colonial Southerners, this is most important. Water was needed for each household, for crops, for animals, and for transportation! Most land records, patents and deeds, make some mention of a watercourse--a river, a creek, a run, a path, a swamp, etc. Another well-know genealogist-historian suggests using the NuckMuck (National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections put out by the Library of Congress). These are hard to use, because there are so many of these catalogs, but, if you are near a large library, call up and ask the reference librarian if they have NuckMuck [yep--they wll know what you mean] This latter is especially a difficult job--you get waylaid by so many interesting entries. Try it first with an unusual name in your family--or a county in which your people lived. Here is a website: www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/nucmc.html The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) provides RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network) bibliographic records and makes associated authority records for collections in the custody of repositories located throughout the United States which are open on a regular basis to researchers and which are unable to contribute national-level cataloging to a national computer database such as OCLC or RLIN. I just now put in the search engine for NUCMC what I thought was an unusual surname, but the search engine must have misread it. I know that a family member had long ago before his demise deposited his collections in some library from the Library of Congress obtained annual reports. I had stumbled on this in the book version of NUCMC. I just now discovered on the cited website that the Library of Virginia reports all the Bible records which it holds. I am going to have to try some new searches with a slightly more unusual name. I did spot a Womack Bible and I will again search for that, as one of my females in Goochland Co. bore that maiden name (named in her father's will, as were other married daughters.) Isn't it amazing what we can do on the internet? For example, NUCMC when I thought I would have to go to a University Library. Catalogs from most Universities, if not all; census databases; e-mail from cranky cousins; e-mail from grateful cousins!!! and so on. I hope you sort out your Smiths!!! I believe Northern Neck folks are hard to sort out. I have a more unusual surname--I thought--until I started rounding them up--all of them prior to 1763 when my ancestor appeared in Orange Co., NC, but had been in Virginia Rangers during French & Indian War!!! Oh, well, some of us like untangling these mysteries. Others just like to connect dots, whether they belong there or not. Remind me of kindergartners trying to color within the lines!!! E.W.Wallace