OK, lets start with a few basics:

1. You need to put those names into some kind of locality. Was this in the United States? Which State? What county (if known)? What City? Do you have a street address on them for census research? If you know about where they lived, go to the "locality" msg boards and look for people who are posting about that area and then repeat your request but include dates and as much info about "where" and "when" as you know or can guess. Example: Looking for info on John Smith KNOWN to be in Massachusetts in 1900 BELIEVED to have been in the Lynn or Salem area in Essex county.

2. What time frame are we talking about? 1800's? Earlier? Later? When were they alive? Were they living during the 1920 census? It would be great if they were as that census is indexed and it would be much easier to find them there.

3. Do you know when any of them were born or when they died? Try running a search by locality and you can use their birth-death dates as a filter.You can do this by going to Ancestry.com home page and look for the search button near the top of the page, then click on the "advance search" option. Then just fill in as many blanks as you can. For example; I would have searched John Smith in Massachusetts, in Essex county because I know he was there then. I would NOT have used Lynn or Salem because I only "think" he may have been there, but I would look for those two cities first in any results I got. I could have just run a search on John Smith in the United states but I would have gotten thousands of hits. Even if I could only narrow it down to the state for sure, I could then have looked at the results to see what hits were in or close to the cities I think he may have been in.

These are just a few things you can do to find your people and to make it easier for others to help you find them. To get more help go to the Ancestry home page and click on "Genealogy Help" button and do some reading.

MO