I'll just add another two penn'orth to what Alf wrote - I agree with all he says... Firstly, *EVERYTHING* that you find "on the Net" is - at the very least - a MINIMUM of one transcription from the original document, with all the inevitable errors that arise in transcribing. [OK the 1911 census won't be (when and if it becomes easily available) and there just MAY be the very odd set of images from Parish Registers - which for baptisms and burials were in any case written-up later from rough notes and memory...] Secondly, that the IGI/FamilySearch - flawed as it is - is still the best-available *finding guide* we have. Our problems would be magnified many times over but for this magnificent piece of work and labour of love of the LDS' members and other submitters. But it *does* need to be checked against Registers... Gus ----- Original Message ----- From: "alf" <alf.fantham@blueyonder.co.uk> To: <WARWICK@rootsweb.com> Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 8:52 AM Subject: Re: [WAR] Frustrated Hi folks and greetings from Kings Norton in the middle of summer where the sky is a nice shade of battleship grey. I suspect that most of us have been down the route highlighted by Diane and have used the techniques set out in various replies. So at the risk of teaching most of you how to suck eggs what can we glean from this. 1. The IGI is an index, riddled with mis-transcriptions, missing entries, missing parish registers and finally someone else's thoughts on where there ancestors should appear. 2. You cannot avoid looking at the original registers, which contain that element missing from the IGI - namely burials 3. Whilst we all will probably have a family missing from one census, the chances of them missing from a whole range is most unlikely. 4. The entries on the census returns or GRO indexes were the first transcription, this time of what the enumerator or registrar thought he heard, with little chance of it being corrected by an illiterate ancestor. 5. The indexes on Ancestry or other census look up sites are another persons attempt to decide what the trained spider that the enumerator used to crawl across the page was really trying to tell us. 6. Lateral thinking is essential - you might know the 21st century spelling of your name, or how it is pronounced, but put yourself in the place of the people who spoke the word, heard the word and wrote the word down 7. If you really cannot find them in the census indexes try using searches on forenames - long winded, but can be very worthwhile 8. If like me you have a fairly uncommon name, write down all the options you can think of, then add some more Lesson over, but no doubt others can add some other hard learned thoughts regards Alf FANTHAM Kings Norton