Ancestry Magazine

We probably all have someone in a side branch of our family tree whom we don’t know—the smallest families, it turns out, are actually quite large. Even if you were from a family that solely bore generation after generation of single children, just three generational steps back would place more than thirty people in your family tree. If you’re from today’s average family that produces 1.86 children per family, that would mean your parents had an average of 1.86 children, and their parents had an average of 1.86 children, and those children each had an average of 1.86 children, and . . . well, you get the idea.

Lost and Found
Potentially, someone you walked past in the supermarket this morning could hold the missing piece of your family puzzle. Or th e person with the answers might be on the other side of the world. You just don’t know. And finding these living links to your family history can be as challenging as finding your ancestors.

For genealogists, one of the most valuable contributions of today’s technology is the Internet and the way it brings together people from all around the world and makes it easy for everyone to collaborate and share. With the help of message boards, mailing lists, websites, and other online tools, people can form communities and living connections based on a surname, an individual, a location, or any other aspect of research they share.

Sheryl Varon knows the power of creating a living connection to her roots. “My research was going slow, there were brick walls that just wouldn’t let me go further,” says Sheryl. “I was missing some links that kept censuses and other things from being as helpful as they might have been.”

Sheryl was looking for her father’s maternal line and had little to nothing to go on. “[My dad’s] real father died when he was a baby, and his mother remarried. His new stepfather moved the family far away from both sets of grandparents and a plethora of cousins. Dad just lost touch,” says Sheryl today.

Sheryl herself did have a little something to go on: her father was still living, and he held a large collection of family photo albums. “When Dad got to be about eighty years old,” she says, “he suddenly decided to break the albums up and began divvying up the photos among my sister, my nephews, and me. When I received a handful in the mail one day, I realized this family we had never known was slipping even further away.”

Her answer? “It was time to ask a lot of questions,” she says. But Sheryl’s dad—the only connection to this family line she thought she had—wasn’t the most reliable source. “My father’s memory was pretty selective,” she says. “Sometimes he would remember all sorts of details and names, and other times he just couldn’t remember. He didn’t remember his maternal grandmother’s maiden name at first, then eventually he did.”

Sheryl decided to look for someone else who might be able to help her piece together her history. “I got on the message boards and started looking for other family members who might be looking for the same families I was researching,” she says. “I hoped other family members or other branches of our family were looking for some of the same people I was, and that they perhaps would have more family information that was passed down through their parents.”

“At first I just read the boards in the areas I was researching, then I started posting in all the areas I thought were appropriate,” continues Sheryl. “I found a cousin in Florida who was also researching our line. He sent me copies of some family Bible pages he had inherited. When those copies came in the mail I got goose bumps. There was almost the whole family, their birth and death dates, the birth and death dates of some of their spouses, the married names of some of the daughters. It was awesome. It brought tears to my eyes.”

When you create a public profile, you let other site visitors know more about you, your research goals, even your areas of expertise. Information offered by you is subsequently entered into a member directory.

There are a number of benefits associated with using public profiles and member directories. Creating a public profile is fast—you’ll usually answer a few specific questions about yourself like the surnames or locations you’re researching and contact information. You control how much information is included in the profile and most profiles can be edited or updated at anytime.

Information in a public profile is then made available to other users, often through a searchable member directory. By posting information about yourself and your research in a public profile, you give people doing similar research a better chance of finding you. The more you share, the better your chances are of finding family members or researchers who can help.

Public profiles can help your research as well. While you are creating your profile, so are other users of the site. You can click on another person’s name and view his or her public profile to learn more about that person and decide if you share common research interests.

For example, say you want to find out more about your Andersen ancestors who lived in Cleveland. Depending on the service you use, you might be able to search for fellow researchers who are also looking for Andersens. If your question is about working with documents written in Danish, you might look for someone who speaks Danish. If you’d like someone nearby to share experiences with, or someone in the area in which your ancestors lived, you could search by city, like Cleveland, Ohio, for example.

A connection service provides another means of finding collaborators, although it usually requires even less effort. Depending on the service, you may never have to do anything more than conduct your regular online ancestor search.

Take, as an example, the Ancestry.com connection service. As a member of Ancestry.com, all you have to do is conduct a search for an ancestor. As Ancestry.com returns your search results, it also returns a link to Find others searching for ancestors with the same name. Select the link, and you’re taken to a page showing you a list of other people (by username) who are doing similar research and another link that will permit you to anonymously contact those researchers.

The goal of a connection service is to help you find people who might have information about your family that will help you in your research, even if those people have never thought to post on a message board or create a public profile. In the case of the Ancestry.com connection service, when you contact someone, you’re identified only by your username—your name and e-mail address are not included. This allows you to contact people without revealing information you might be uncomfortable sharing with someone you don’t yet know. You can also control the amount of information people see about you via the My Account area of Ancestry.com.

In the end, any connection that can help you safely and effectively contact other researchers with similar interests puts you one step closer to reaching your goal—finding people, living connections you may not have known, who hold pieces of your puzzle, and working with these people to put the pieces into place.

Every connection you make won’t be a perfect fit, cautions Sheryl. In her own situation, most of the connections weren’t the right ones, but they, too, helped her. And the ones that did fit? “Those made all the difference,” she says.

“It only takes one good lead,” Sheryl says. “I found that people were more than willing to help if they could, and that even on the slight possibility there was a family connection, they would contact me and share information. Over about nine years of genealogy research, I’ve met about a dozen cousins who are also researching both my father’s maternal and paternal lines. I have gotten a ton of information I would never have found without the clues we were able to share.”

With over 16 million posts on over 155,000 different message boards, the Message Boards at Ancestry.com are currently the largest and most active message boards devoted to family history research on the Internet.

To access the message boards, select the Ancestry Community tab. Input a keyword or browse the boards by topic. Post a message of your own to ask your question or share information you have. Check back often to view the replies or check Send me an e-mail when anyone replies to this message, and Ancestry.com will notify you whenever someone posts a reply. Remember, however, to update your e-mail address whenever it changes—you’d hate to miss the reply you’ve been waiting for only because your contact information changed, right?

Create a public profile and let other Ancestry.com members search for your information (whether it’s personal, research-related, or both, you decide) through the member directory where all the public profiles on Ancestry.com are stored. You can access the member directory from the Ancestry Community tab.

In the member directory, you can search for people who share your research interests, lineage, language, or any other element of the profile. Once you find someone of interest, you can view their complete profile or contact them to learn more.

Additionally, the expanded connection service at Ancestry.com lets members who are researching the same people contact each other in a way that is comfortable and private.

Whenever you conduct a search at Ancestry.com, the connection service offers you a link to other members who have searched for someone matching the person you searched for. You’ll also find links to the connection service in the My Ancestry area of the site and on some record pages. Look for the icon, the Find Other People link, or the Make a Connection box. When you view the list of other members, select the username to view the person’s profile or click on the Contact link to contact the person through the anonymous connection tool.

When you contact someone through the connection service, you will only be identified by your username—your name and e-mail address are not included in the message. And, as always, you can control your level of participation in the connection service. You can even opt out, if you’d like.