Yup. Those are the kinds of openings that Lisa was describing. Check around where your outside faucets are; that's another prime location.

One good way to figure out where the mice are getting in is to turn the lights out in the basement and to make it as dark as possible. Walk around the perimeter of the basement and look for light coming in from the outside. Steel wool fills up small to medium holes nicely.

I don't know which is more scary for me now.

I recall the dead in the wall mouse smell.

Now, I don't smell anymore. So only those visiting would smell it...and I would be oblivious!

Can you imagine?

So I'll continue to catch them live or have a known dead place!

yes snap traps are the ones that close on the mouse. When they work as intended, it is a pretty instant death - the trap closes and breaks their neck and that's that. But I have had a few times where they weren't dead - the trap had their leg or some other part and they were too injured to just let go but not dead. I have to confess I handed that off to Mr. Lisa with instructions not to tell me what he did, but somehow he put the poor things out of their misery.

Anyhow, we found that if you bait them with cheese or peanut butter, sometimes the mice can manage to eat the cheese or peanut butter and not trip the trap, or trip it as they are leaving which causes the aforementioned issue where only their leg gets stuck. We had taken to baiting with popcorn and using sewing needle and thread to basically thread through the popcorn and then tie it to the trap trigger. That kept them from grabbing the food and running off. That worked much better, but we'd occasionally still have a "missing food but no mouse" incident.

We ended up having an exterminator out at one point for a bug issue and he also gave us some tips for the mice. He said that mice don't actually see that well so they travel along the perimeter of the walls. He set empty (no bait at all) traps along the outside walls of our unfinished basement -- perpendicular to the wall with the trigger part towards the wall. He said the mice just come booking down the wall, walk right over the trigger and set it off. That did work, surprisingly well actually, and since it didn't require any bait at all, we stayed with that method until we sealed up that last hole and haven't seen a mouse since.

There's really no pleasant way to deal with a mouse problem. You could call an exterminator -- they are good at finding the little holes that mice get in, but they are also pricey and really like to go gangbusters with the poision traps and such so you really have to tell them you don't want poison. I doubt you have to take mice 6 miles away - I would think one or two, maybe somewhere where there's some kind of appealing shelter for them (an old falling down barn in the middle of a field somewhere?) would be fine, if you are more comfortable with live traps. And if you manage to find and seal their entrances, you can put them outside in your lawn and they won't get back in!