Hello: Just another one of my two cents going on here (I'm going to be out of pocket change soon!). Actually, I wanted to add my own story to this, partly because it shows the power of what we are doing here with these county websites and throughout the entire genealogy Internet community. My gr.grandmother was Mary Ellen Yates, b. 1858 in IL, d. 1902 in WI. There was no death certificate, no obituary and very little info had come down to me as my grandmother, her daughter was only 7 when she died. Her other children had died when I was still in elementary school in the 60s, long before I became interested in genealogy. The only info I had on her parents was from her marriage license in 1876 giving her father as Rhuny Yates and her mother as Arminda Wilson. From other family members I knew that Arminda's maiden name was Scritchfield or Scrutchfield. I picked up the Pierce County, WI site in November of 1997. I thought that I had, over the years, found everything there was to be found on my family in the area, but I was pleasantly surprised that I had not. While transcribing the 1880 census for Spring Lake Township where my ancestors settled in 1867, I found a Wilson family living just down the road from my Britton families. The wife's name was Arminda, the same as my gr.gr.grandmother's. Living just a little ways further down the road was the family of Johnson Scrichfield. The light went on. I knew it was too much of a coincidence that someone with such an unusual last name and another person with the same name as my gr.gr.grandmother could be living so close together and not be connected. At about this same time, my mother and I were going through some old family photos she had been sent and in amongst them was a very elderly man in a coffin with the name William Johnson Wilson and a date on it. Click, on came another light bulb. Arminda and her family moved sometime between 1880 and 1900 to KS and then disappeared from my radar screen. I sent to the KS Vital statistics for a death certificate on this individual and found he was the half-brother of my gr.grandmother, Mary Ellen. It gave his birthplace as IL and his mother as Arminda. I knew I had the right guy. I found his obit which listed his birthplace as Higginsville, IL. I plugged Higginsville into the USGS, but only found one place in Vermillion County, IL, so I started there. No luck. Nor did the Bourbon Co. KS (where William Wilson died) have any further info on Arminda or her husband Shedric Wilson. I had found them in the 1900 census giving their birth month and year, but nothing more. They had disappeared by the 1910 census. There were no death certificates, nor a cemetery record in the county for them. And again, no obits. So now what? Back to Arminda's brother, Johnson. By this time, Illinois was placing their early marriage records online and I found a marriage license for Johnson and his wife Elizabeth Sanders in 1850 in Crawford Co., IL. I now had a place to start looking that I felt was more grounded in fact. By looking through the 1850 Crawford Co., IL census, I found Lewis Scrutchfield and family, including my Arminda. Now it was time for my Eureka. But there was more to come. I contacted a woman listed on the Crawford Co., IL website who, for a small fee would check materials at the court house. I wrote, sent my $25.00 and held my breath. Within a couple of weeks, I had Arminda's marriage license (which I never would have found on the Illinois online records, the name is given as Smithfield and Rhuny was so horribly misspelled it was unrecognizable), her father's probate materials from 1856 listing all the children named in the 1850 census, as well as one who had already married and moved out of the family home by 1850. And the fact that he was a widower by 1856, so his wife, Malinda had died during that 6 year time frame. The 1850 census records gave this families place of origin as Indiana. They have their pre-1850 marriage records online, so I gave it a shot. And another little gift fell down from heaven. There was their marriage record, giving Malinda's maiden name as Vest. They were married in April 1828 in Washington County, IN. What had once been a brick wall came crashing down in a matter of weeks. What would have taken years had been accomplished in a relatively short amount of time thanks to the Internet and to all who have been diligently placing genealogical materials online. And it all began with my own desire to help in that process by adopting a very small, rural county in the WIGenWeb project. Debbie Barrett http://www.rootsweb.com/~wipierce/ http://www.rootsweb.com/~nywashin/