Joyce, if you get any time to do Whitaker Research in England, I would suggest the following. I am copying the list as we have members who live in England and others who may also be planning Genealogy trips. I hope you find the following helpful. If I have made any errors in the following, please correct me. Thanks and good hunting. In London, go to The Society of Genealogists, 14 Charterhouse Buildings, London, EC1M 7BA. The building doesn't look like much from the outside, but upstairs they have a lot of British Isles Genealogy information including many County records. Most of the early Whitakers are from the area on both side of the County border between Lancashire and York in NW England. If you have a chance, I suggest specifically looking at the old Parish Registers from: Rochdale, Antham, Padiham, Holme, Burnley, and Oldham in Lancashire, and Dewsbury and Skipton in Yorkshire. I am sure there are other Parishes also where you will find early Whitakers. National records for England and Wales are I think keep in two primary locations in London. Most recent (within the last 200 years) records on British birth, marriage, death, probate, etc. are kept in the General Register Office, St. Catherine's House, 10 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6JP. However most of us Americans are looking for English connections pre-1800. Copies of old parish registers (often going back to 1558, the date the govt required Churches to keep these records) and all census information (The British only started doing a nationwide census in 1810) are located at the Public Record Office(PRO). Most records for parish registers and censuses are keep at the PRO office on Chancery Lane, London, WC 2A 1LR. I believe they also house military records there which might be of interest to some. Considering the many American Whitakers with established or suspected Quaker ties, I would be very interested in any Whitaker records found among the records and indexes keep by the Quakers and located at: Friends' House, Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ. The Quakers kept very complete records since George Fox founded the sect in the mid 1600's. At Friends' House are 85 volumes of records containing 260,000 births, 40,000 marriages, and 310,000 burials. If you get up north to Lancashire and Yorkshire, try stopping in Lancashire at the County Record Office (CRO) located at Bow Lane, Preston PR1 8ND. They have all the Parish registers there. Wills also exist back to 1545 and name indexes are available in the CRO. Suggest to check there for 1600's Whitaker's looking for Mark son of Thomas, Robert son of WIlliam, William son of Henry, anyone son of Joshua, and John son of Charles among others. They could be clues. They also have marriage records in the CRO. In addition to local records, there is an England wide multivolumne set of books indexes all marriages in England. If you can find, you might check there. Yorkshire is now two Counties, North Yorkshire and South Yorkshire. I think most Whitaker information will be in North Yorkshire. Their CRO also has many records. You visit there by appointment only. They are open M-F during normal business hours and late on Wednesday's. Of course, be aware my information in old and this may have changed. The North Yorkshire CRO is located at County Hall, Northallerton, North Yorkshire, DL7 8AD. ph: (0609) 3123, ext. 455. Hi, Rich Wow, you've done a lot of research! We're going to England in a couple of weeks, and I don't know if we'll even be in Lancashire. But if we are, would it help to look up this Robert Whitaker, or do you know enough about him yet? I'm not sure where to start looking, but if you could suggest something (birth date, etc.), I'll see what happens. Of course, it's also dependent on getting my family to stop long enough for me to go to a city hall, etc. They're not as interested in genealogy yet! Joyce Dressel Thanks, Rich Fulton, rfulton@us.ibm.com World Wide Mid-Market Sales Executive, S/390 SW, SWG IBM, home office 1420 West Main Street, Apt. 1008 Lewisville, TX. 75067 USA Phone: 972-434-1033, t/l 450-8996 Fax: 817-962-8780, t/l 522-8780