During the course of your research, you have surely learned more about the family, including additional relatives and more event dates. You have also begun to narrow down the possible places where the family may have originated. These places allow still other approaches to your immigrant origins research.

Perhaps previous assignments have lead to an area where the surname seems to be more common. Once the geographic region of an ancestral surname is identified, then the networking concepts below will work. If you have not determined a locality, try a study of the surname.

Sometimes a linguistic analysis of the surname may suggest regions where the name may have originated. For example, certain suffixes may indicate a likely region for a surname.