My dad has always wanted to know more about his grandparents and who he decended from. His grandmother is a Ware from Floyd Co. Georgia and has been fairly easy to track down over the last ten years. His grandfather has been a different story. We have bible pages with information on his first marriage and also had found him in the 1880 census in Ellis Co. Texas, and we had a death certificate with information given by his second wife. We had lots of clues but nothing seemed to come together until about 1998 when I happened on to a marriage record in Georgia, not Tennessee. I had ignored a cardinal rule of genealogy, the 5 mile radius search. Anyway, armed with that information I was able to find him and his parents and siblings in the Georgia 1850 census. His parents and siblings in the Alabama 1860 and 1870 census. These gave me the names of all his siblings including the step brothers and sisters. There were two very unusual names among these folks and since I had just joined the Rootweb mailing lists I thought I would put out a query that included those names, Felix Grundy Cate and Simon Gideon Nero Cates. Both spellings were used by the family at this time. I had a response to both names and was able to verify much of the information that I had found. Notabley that all the children listed were not full brothers and sisters and that Polly the woman listed as the wife was not the mother of the 1st family. After twenty some odd years of searching our family has let out a big wahoo! I have been greatful to both the ladies who contacted me with this information and have apreciated getting to know them. Because of my sucess in this area I thought I would try some of the names of the women in my family on other lists, since women are almost imposible to track. And my luck was very good with them also. I have tried to return the favors by doing look ups for others when I go to the Family History Library in Salt Lake and hope that they have been benefited by the information found. I hope to learn to use some of the other tools that are available on Rootsweb. Thanks for a great site.