The following article was published in an Irish Genealogical Society Newsletter from the 1980s, with credit given to the Freeborn County Tracer, Oct-Nov-Dec 1986. GRUENWALD'S LAWS OF GENEALOGY ALL OF US have learned to live with Murphy's Law: "If anything can go wrong, it will." Peter's Principle holds sway: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his/her level of incompetence." I offer for your consideration my own laws based on the observation of the activities we go through in pursuit of our elusive knowledge: 1ST LAW: A family genealogist is without honor in his/her own clan. (My brother could care less, my cousins blink at me. Maybe someday a niece, nephew or grandchild will say "thanks".) 2ND LAW: There is a positive, but not significant, relationship between the amount of correspondence and the amount of information gleaned. Corollary I to 2ND LAW: The more urgently desired the information is, the slower is the reply to an inquiry. Corollary II to 2ND LAW: Given two identical surnames as a result of research, one of which is your ancestor, the other has all the information. 3RD LAW: Serendipity has solved more genealogical puzzles than perspiration. Corollary I to 3RD LAW: All persons will spell their names any way they wish. (Laib and Lipe are cousins, Black and Bleck are the same, Tews and Taves are cousins, all Grunwalds that use an "e" in the name put it wherever they feel like - including using two of them. Corollary II to 3RD LAW: All ancestors use any first name (and/or nickname) they wish so as to avoid using the first one on their birth certificate. With this against us, what keeps us going? THEOREM I which states: "Everybody has got to be someplace sometime."