Researchers on the trail of elusive ancestors sometimes turn to 18th- and early 19th-century newspapers after exhausting the first tier of genealogical sources (i.e., census records, wills, deeds, marriages, etc.). Generally speaking, early newspapers are not indexed, so they require investigators to comb through them, looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. With his latest book, Robert Barnes has made one aspect of the aforementioned chore much easier. This remarkable book contains advertisements for missing relatives and lost friends from scores of newspapers published in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia, as well as a few from New York and the District of Columbia. The newspaper issues begin in 1719 (when the "American Weekly Mercury" began publication in Philadelphia) and run into the early 1800s. The author's comprehensive bibliography, in the Introduction to the work, lists all the newspapers and other sources he examined in preparing the book. The volume references 1,325 notices that chronicle the appearance or disappearance of 1,566 persons.

Ancestors of Raymond Clyde Lantz (b. 1951), son of Raymond G. Lantz and Doris F. Bruckman. He was born in Altoona, Pa. He was married twice. He married (2) 1977 in Pensacola, Florida, Dianna Lee Crossley (b. 1956), daughter of Noel N. Crossley of Ann Arbor, Michigan and Sandra L. Shaw of Port Huron, Michigan. Some early ancestors are traced to early 1300s. Members of the Lantz family came to Pennsylvania from Germany around the mid 1700s. The Crossley family is traced to England in the early 1800s. Various other immigrant ancestors came from Germany, Switzerland and England settling in Pennsylvania, Maryland, via Canada in New York, and elsewhere.