Posts in July 20, 2017

It can be tempting in cyberspace to fire off a message about that ancestor who frustrates us. Providing scant details about our problem ancestor also frustrates those who read our query and either makes them unlikely to help us or causes everyone to waste time in a cycle of probing questions to determine what the poster actually knows. There are some very helpful people on some message boards who simply won’t take the time to reply vague queries such as “I’m looking for an ancestor’s parents.” In that vein, consider including the following information in your query: what you know about the ancestor (approximate dates and places of birth, marriage, and death) where the ancestor lived–a summary of locations in chronological order if possible really unusual alternate spellings of […]