I've heard nothing back yet from the Social Security Administration or the Maryland Archives on my queries regarding John NOVAK, so I tried some other angles on my wife's lines. The site that allows one-step searches of the Ellis Island database (http://home.pacbell.net/spmorse/ellis/ellis.html) ate up an hour or so of time last night with futile searches for variants of STEPHANOVIC and IVOSEVIC. The former is the name of her grandmother's first husband and the latter is the name of the grandmother's sister's husband. The idea is to locate the grandmother's birthplace. I know from obituaries and census records when these folks arrived in the USA (1901 and 1905, respectively) but they don't come up in Ellis Island searches. Other families coming from the same part of the world (then Austria-Hungary, now Italy, Slovenia and Croatia) do appear, so it must be some quirk of spelling that is muddling the search. I wonder why the Ellis Island site does not build in a soundex code for each surname?