This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Author: MichaelCharlesWight Surnames: Classification: queries Message Board URL: http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.wright/15387.1.1.2/mb.ashx Message Board Post: Hi Melinda, I am not surprised you knew a Mike Wright as a child. There are over 30,000 living Mike Wrights in the US today. It is a name as common as mud. Might as well be Dan Jones or Smith. But Arlie Wright, now that is something that should stand out a bit in the records. In fact, two things come immediately to mind. First, there is a fairly prized hybrid cultivar of cactus (Crassulaceae,echeveria gibbiflora)that people here in the southwest like to grow in their dry gardens called "Arlie Wright". It is a beautifully colored broad leaf little cactus that is quite hardy. It is named, I believe, after the son of its developer, the legendary San Diego area nurseryman, Dick Wright (of De Luz, CA). The other Arlie Wright I know about is a young professional gardener for Baylor University over in Waco, TX (I think a grandson of Dick Wright). How weird is that coincidence that I should remember these things? However, I doubt seriously it has any bearing on your genealogical problem. They just sort of popped into my head. I am definately not the guy to come to for WV Wrights. My database contains not a single Wright from WV. All of my work has been done on New England and Ohio Wrights with some forays into the genealogy of early NC Wrights, most of whom are connected to very early coastal Virginia and Maryland ancestors. Your task would seem to be aided considerably by available census records, marriage and death records as well as living relatives whom you might try to contact if you have any of their names. If you have no names, places or dates from records research, you might try writing to all the Wrights in an area you know they once lived. I once did a blanket mailing to every Wright in the three Northeast most counties of Ohio looking for some information on a particular relative of mine who I knew had lived there for a short time but for whom I could find no records. What I got back was so much information it took me 6 months to sort it out! The trick to getting a good response from this type of mailing is to be open and honest about what you are doing and pledge to not publish any information about living relatives without their permission. In my mailing, I enclosed two copies of a General Release form that contained a request for the respondant to list in a big space on the form those bits of information or data that they did not want published. At the bottom of the form I wrote out my pledge not to publish the listed items, signed and dated both forms, and invited them to keep one copy for their records. My response rate was 22%, which is fantastic for this type of thing. However, I would only do that after I had looked at all the available census records for the area and all the vital statistics (birth, marriage and death records) for the area. Doing that generally focuses your letter into a fairly narrow range of questions from which people can see you have done your howework, that you are serious, and that you have a very real problem only they can help you solve. When you ask for information, provide as much detail as you can, especially birth, death and marriage dates, places and names and be specific in what you are asking for; dates, places, names. Peolple are more likely to help you with a specific bit of data, if they have a good frame of reference within which they can recognize that they know something useful to you. Unfortunately, the information you need to acquire to frame such specific questions can only be obtained by studying the existing records for the area of interest. A good way to do that is to join Ancestry.com for a period of time and use their databases to search the vast array of records they have on-line. There will be dozens of Arlie Wrights, but you should be able to pair up the right one with Cecilia and find the family in the census records. From there you will know where to look for vital statistic records and start to follow them around as they moved from WV to NY or back or whatever. It is well worth the money to join Ancestry for a short time, get your search done, then resign membership. There is no way you could do the equivalent research cheaper unless your local family history center has access to the Ancestry.com database and you use their access to do the same searchs. That is the best I know to tell you. There are others who are on the Wright-list and see these message board posts who I know have extensive Virginia and WV databases and perhaps will see your post and can help you more directly. Good luck, Mike Wright Important Note: The author of this message may not be subscribed to this list. If you would like to reply to them, please click on the Message Board URL link above and respond on the board.