You can gather facts from many forms of information available online, libraries, family, bibles, churches, court houses &

local/state government -municipal court- county court of appeals- auditor - probate-(marriage, divorce,birth, death, real estate

& wills). Phone books, city directories, newspapers (marriage notice, obituaries, births, divorces, & through an index to a

local paper), federal census, state census, county history books, county records, war records, social security, immigration & ship

records (if you are lucky to know the port of arrival), declaration of intent, naturalization, early voting records.

Don't forget to check into county records, as new counties were formed, information could be in the new and old counties. Same

with townships, some townships may have been renamed or joined with another.

Your search should include the use of local libraries, state libraries and historical & genealogical societies that has an archive

division. Family History Centers also has an invaluable source of information. Letter writing is a good source, but you should

still check the information presented in the letter, and/or question anything that doesn't match. For people who immigrated to

the US, check their home of origin for records. For example in Ireland everything is broken down by a religious parish in each county,

unlike the United States where records are broken down by state-county-city- townships.

Remember people we are only human and do make mistakes in copying our information, so keep trying to check your files.

Enumerators in the census made alot of mistakes in recording names as they wrote what they heard. Remember there can be

different dialects/accents within a area, so spelling could be off. If you know a person lived in an area or could be from a family,

but can't at the present time associate one person to a family. You should keep all information at hand and work with trying to

find that link, which could be called an educated guess, scientific theory, or more commonly called making assumptions. I'd

rather be able to have the facts to make an assumption so that I can prove myself wrong. But to disregard any information

would mean that you basically given up or lost out on proving a link to that family in another form. If you are indeed wrong

about a line, at least you proved no relationship to that family, and you had a learning experience.