Because you asked how I got all that family history: I began when I was 27 years old (am in my early 60's now) by interviewing my 82 year old grandfather, and his sister-in-law, both of whom grew up in Rocky Comfort, MO. I asked them to tell me everything they knew about their ancestors, and I wrote down everything they said. Grandpa's Mother died when he was born, and she was the Youngblood. Both of them knew her brother, (Bryant Hardy Youngblood), and his wife, and together could piece together the names of their children, and that's all they knew. Grandpa knew that his parents were married in Mayfield, KY, and he had his mother's birthdate and death date. Though the Mayfield 1852 records had burned, a part of the birth records for the latter part of that year were intact, and a copy was found in Salt Lake City, and I found the announcement of his mother's birth there, with the names of her parents. What luck! I then found the parents listed in the Mayfield, Graves County census record for 1850 in Salt Lake, and they had been married within the last year, and were living with her parents, the Williams family. Now I knew the name of Alfred Youngblood, and I searched census records for 1860's, 1870's etc, in KY and MO for that family, and found them in Bollinger County, MO and later the family, without Alfred with them, back in Mayfield. I thought then he might have died in the war, so I looked up Civil War records, and found his in that library, and learned he had been killed. I found books about Youngbloods in that LDS library, and one especially, the Maberry book had names very like some of ours seen in the census records, and they were MO. people, only living in Ray County, near Bollinger, so I wrote the author, and also several of the Youngblood researchers the author had interviewed for his book. He had listed their addresses. I heard from one of those researcher's only, and she was a descendant of Mary Magdalene Youngblood, the 6th child of Wm., and she had all the family history sheets on Alfred and William. She also had the Civil War records on Alfred Youngblood, and the application letters written by Alfred's wife and her mother-in-law to Washington D.C. to try to get a widow's pension for her and her 7 children. She had to prove that these children were hers. Her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Garret, a midwife, had delivered all of them, and had not properly registered their births, so it took quite a few letters before Alfred's widow finally was able to receive her pension. I was sent copies of all the correspondence which this researcher had secured from Civil War Pension records in Washington D.C. I also looked up Civil War military records on all of William's sons while in Salt Lake, and found that two sons fought for the North, and the three youngest ones, for the South. I found, through the LDS library, on either their AF, or IGI, (are those the right initials?), some of the names that were on the sheets that I had been given by the descendant of Mary Magdalene Youngbood. This was on my 2nd and last trip to Salt Lake. I copied down who submitted the information I found there, and wrote to these people, and through that heard from researchers on the lines of William O. B. Youngblood and James M. Youngblood, so I learned all about their descendants. One informer I wrote to was actually an LDS missionary working in the library during the time I was there visiting, only I didn't know that at the time. She had been there helping people with their genealogy for two years. I found that out when I returned home, and wrote to her. She called me on the telephone answering my letter. In trying to find the parents of our William, she had had research done by a genealogist at the library, and she sent me his sheet listing 10 possible fathers of our William Youngblood. When I got a computer, I spelled Youngblood on Yahoo.com, and got Wayne Youngblood's website that way, and read what he wrote about this family, and on Youngblood-L@rootsweb.com, I found Dorothy Quaife, who answered some of my queries, and these lead me to finding the "Thomas Youngblood Family" written by Margaret Ann Cloys and Ollis Smith, and one of these is Wayne Youngblood's great Aunt. Anyway, all this line that I had already learned about is listed almost perfectly in it, and with a few additional facts I had previously not known. The hard thing about it all is that we still don't know who William's parents are, and we aren't even sure that William belongs in this book right now. He must belong there, but how come his brothers are 30 and 40 years older than he is? All this has taken about ten years of sporadic search. Months go by and I do nothing. I think I have been very lucky to find as much as I have found so far, and mine is not the most orthodox way one should go about searching. The correct way is to write places of death and birth, and get copies of the birth and death certificates, and go back that way. Death certificates usually have the parents' names of the deceased, the spouse' name, and also the place of birth of the deceased. So, that gives you a whole new earlier generation, and a place to go to write for a birth certificate. I have mostly been successful thanks to having had ancestors who were curious enough in the last 75 years to want to know their family history, and to keep track of their descendants, and to put it all on paper. Beverly Rich