Hi Fellow Listers, To David's and Mar's list of suggestions I would add that Genie is invaluable for its listings of placenemes. It also has a county option which further narrows down the field. Genie can be downloaded for free, as can Parloc, the parish locator. There are other things you can do if you have got to the hair tearing stage. I used to look at the censuses on PPP---and now thanks to my town library I can add Ancestry to the equation. I also browsed the relevant years doing a surname search on Free BMD and then if lucky checked the area the registration district covered. I am sure when you put your mind to it you can think of more. It is amazing how inventive one can get when desperate. Of course transcribers, not of the locality, or not with English as their first language were at a great disadvantage. English placenames are amazing in their variety---some quite unbelievable! Re the latter it sometimes happened after an abortive session to have the solution pop up into my mind, as a half remembered memory surfaced---or wake up in the middle of the night with the solution! I liked David's example of the enumerator's stab at Llangollen----the spelling of which shows that the speaker pronounced the Welsh "double ll" correctly. Solving badly written image pages is a challenge and can be fun, if you don't let it "get to you". I really enjoyed this thread as it was such a change to the usual look-ups. I hope that some more comes forth! Regards, Muriel

Genie is a program used by the census volunteers for FreeCEN- I guess I can look forward to hundreds more people volunteering to help me complete the 1861 for Warwickshire so they can legitimately download the program ! Cheers Wendy I would add that Genie is invaluable for its listings of placenemes. It also has a county option which further narrows down the field. Genie can be downloaded for free, as can Parloc, the parish locator.