[or-roots] Advice for Newbies that the rest of should remember

[Leslie Chapman]

First of all, if you are having Puter problems, some of us on the list are
fairly competent in that area and feel free to throw a plea for help out
with the proviso that you will probably have to be contacted off list;

Just as an example, many of you may not be aware that though your posts to
the list are filtered through a computer at Or-roots, and in some formats
the sender's email address doesn't appear in the body of the email, many of
us can access your personal email address that way.

For the record mine is; reedsportchapmans at verizon.net

Presumptious of me wasn't it?

Now as to the how to's of posting to the list;

We be a pretty relaxed group, BUT the more information you can provide up
front, the better we can help you. Often I spend a couple of hours chasing
somebodie's kin down in the census, only to find out they have all that
info. Or think they do any way, sometimes you get fooled, you find a husband
and wife with a couple of kids whose given names all match the family you
want and they are in the right place at the right time and they are WRONG. I
especially find that in my Melvin line; of course when every generation has
to perpetuate Jonathon, John, Mary, Elizabeth etc that makes it easier to
get confused.

Sorry, don't let me get side tracked like that, we'll be here all night!

I bring the relaxed up because a lot of lists won't even post queries that
don't follow a RIGID protocol; SURNAME ALL CAPS, given name, location of
birth, time of birth, location of marriage, time, death same way YADDA
YADDA,.

My point here is if you come on and just ask for a person by first and last
name and say they were in Oregon, chances are you can get hundreds of wrong
answers; so it is better to start off with most of that RIGID info, I
personally detest the all caps surname convention and we certainly pretty
much ignore it here, but the more information provided up front, the less
time we spend reinventing the wheel.

The biggest crime we ALL consistently commit here is to not keep our subject
relevant to our email. The biggest joke was the night I came on to chastise
some folks for that and forgot to change my subject line!

The most important thing we all need to remember is that just about any time
you spend some time helping another person with THEIR genealogy, you are
quite likely to be rewarded in some way by finding something to help with
your own.

And we are a pretty resourceful bunch, sometimes we are slow to respond to
peoples needs, sometimes we see the same post two or three times before
somebody decides to play around with it, I know I blew off someone's post
here a couple years back because I didn't think I could help them, next time
they posted it I decided to see what I could come up with and found some
really great web site that not only answered their question but many of my
own.

Sometimes we be just tooooooo busy, I haven't had a real day off, between
family gatherings etc I have been running for almost a month now.

Les C