No worries--I'd be glad to help if I can. You can find some of my bona fides at these sites where I've helped others:
http://www.wargs.com/other/felt.html,
http://www.wargs.com/other/holloway.html,
http://www.wargs.com/other/waterston.html,
http://www.wargs.com/political/mccain.html,
http://www.wargs.com/other/aniston.html,
http://www.wargs.com/political/richardson.html,
http://www.newenglandancestors.org/r...cles_gbr73.asp,
http://www.newenglandancestors.org/r...cles_gbr83.asp,
http://www.newenglandancestors.org/r...cles_gbr77.asp,
http://www.newenglandancestors.org/r...cles_gbr78.asp,
http://www.newenglandancestors.org/r...cles_gbr80.asp,
http://www.countyhistorian.com/cecil...p/Jodie_Foster,
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb....08/peirsol.htm,
http://blog.cleveland.com/pdopinion/...ts_and_ra.html. You can also take a look at what I have on my own ancestry here:
http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-...on2&id=I194038. Think about it, discuss with your family, then let me know what you want done and I'll try to do some digging for you, and hopefully get something good. I do better with New England families, but I've worked on southern ones, too (I'm not sure which you might fall into--Cokie Roberts is from Louisiana but she's also descended from William Brewster of the Mayflower. I traced her descent and posted it to Caleb Johnson who runs a Mayflower website a few years ago). For that matter, I've done a fair bit of work on Quebecois families, both in Canada as well as in Louisiana (I helped out earlier this year with data I had on Alanis Morissette which was used to show her kinship to Hillary Clinton). I would suggest that anything you want to send me that is personal (names, birth dates/places of living people), you send via email rather than post, just for your own safety's sake. I'm safety conscious myself, and even though RootsWeb in theory is supposed to privatize data for living people, and even though I've set the benchmark for that at 1920 (even though the 1930 census is and has been out for a few years now), I privatize that data by hand, just to make absolutely sure that my Mom, my brother, sister-in-law, nieces, aunts, uncles, grandpa and so on are all protected. I'm not sure exactly how you do that, but I know Rob has (or had) my email address, so I assume you probably have access to it, too, just make sure you tell me who you are if you go that route because I got inundated a year ago with more emails than I could handle, and with my niece's taking up so much time I generally don't have time to answer every email and I wouldn't want to miss yours. I help those who I actually know nowadays. Its funny (I think) but I was able to trace my kinship to two old childhood friends, one of whom I still keep in touch with (and is now an attorney at a good firm in Phoenix), found that my brother's best man is kin, that his mother and two of my Mom's other friends are kin, found that one of my professor's is kin (he was also the chair of my thesis committee, but neither of us knew we were related until nearly 10 years since I'd last sat in a class and he'd been retired for a few years himself) and there's been a few other interesting connections I've come across since I started this in '92. Gotta go get some sleep now, though--I had my nieces today, had some light housework to do, and have to be up at 6:10 tomorrow morning to do the whole thing over again. The life of an uncle, and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world! Oh, heck, one last bit o' trivia: Bill Gates, Bill Hewlett, David Packard & Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the World Wide Web) are all kin. Cheers, Ms D.