It’s never too late to respond to message board posts

Have you “googled” your ancestors and found queries on message boards that are several years old?  I recently did, and found it’s never too late to respond to these posts.  Here is my story:

I am currently working on a Masters of Library Science degree.  In my web design class last semester, we had an assignment to use a search engine other than Google or Yahoo!, so I chose to highlight the features of the site “Ask.com”.  “Ask.com” is a natural search language engine – meaning you can type your query in words you would use, and the search engine would craft the query to find what you are looking for.

For grins, I typed in the search query “who was Leendert Hofland”.  Leendert Hofland was my great-grandfather, who emigrated from Holland to America in 1903.  I was expecting the search to return the Ellis Island website, and maybe one or two others on the Oskam family (his wife’s family).  But the first result was a message board post from the CousinConnect website – a posting over three years old, asking for information on Leendert Hofland, who had emigrated from Holland in 1903.

It would have been easy to ignore the query post due to its age.  Many people change their emails, lose interest in genealogy, or find the answers they seek on another website after that amount of time.  But I went ahead and posted some basic information on the Leendert Hofland family, and included my work email on the posting.

Later that afternoon, I received an email at work from the woman in the Netherlands who had posted the original query message on CousinConnect.  She was excited to find another cousin in the States, and we continued to exchange information on the Hofland family line.  She has information from Holland that is more difficult for me to find, and I have original documents I have been able to scan and send to her.  It’s a “win-win” situation for both of us!

The moral of this story is – it’s never too late to respond to queries and postings, no matter how old.  Many times your response will go into the ether of the internet, but occasionally you may post the missing link that someone has been searching for.  Genealogy is a hobby of generousity – of time, research materials, and answers to questions.  If you are free with your information, others will be free with theirs.  So cast your seeds of information upons the waters of websites, forums, message boards, and email, and you will see your research bloom because of it.

“Hearts bound together” – Sunday Lesson

A few weeks ago, I was asked to teach a lesson on why we do family history work.  I based the lesson on a talk given by Henry B. Eyring at the April, 2005 LDS General Conference entitled “Hearts Bound Together” ( you can find the article at http://www.lds.org )
What I loved about this talk was that (then) Elder Eyring reminded us that the people we find when doing our genealogy research are real people.  They lived upon this earth, had lives, families, dreams, hopes, ambitions, problems, character virtues and flaws, etc.  In other words – they were just like us.

When we do our family history work, when we find the names of our ancestors, let’s take a minute to imagine them as real people – our friends, and our family.  We can do this by learning as much about them as we can – more than just names and dates and places.  We can find out what they did for a living, what churches they went to, what they said in their wills, what their journals said about them. 

Family history gives us that complete picture of a person, more so than your basic “genealogy research” often does.  Let us always remember that our ancestors weren’t that much different from us.  Hope you enjoy the article!

Welcome to the Midnight Genealogist

Hello everyone – and welcome to my blog, “The Midnight Genealogist”.  This is a blog for anyone who is trying to do family research, but find they usually only have bits and pieces of time to work on it.  My goal is to share with you the tips I use to eke out my family history a little at a time.  I would love to learn from you as well.

I started this blog because most of the articles I read are by people who are professional genealogists.  They do research full time.  I don’t have that luxury – I generally have time about 11pm at night to do some quick searches or skim one of the many genealogy books I have trying to figure out a problem or get some information quickly.  I thought that many of you out there are in the same boat – you want to research, but only have small amounts of time to devote to it.

I know from experience that there are may things we can do – quickly and from home – to further our genealogy research.  It just takes a little creativity and some burning of the midnight oil!