Absolutely! Sharing what we know, even if some of the information is unimportant to us at the time, will open unexpected doors.
Several years ago I published a small amount of information about Nathan R. BROWN’s family. Nathan was married twice — first to Hannah M. GRAY, second to Anna C.
Hannah’s relationship to me is “wife of my half 3rd great-granduncle” (now there’s a close relationship). I had information on her first marriage to William ROGERS, which really wasn’t important to my immediate research. However, in researching this family, I published everything I knew, including this first marriage.
Just yesterday I received an email from a researcher in Wisconsin. Apparently this William Rogers was her 2nd great-grandfather and had been a brick wall in her research for years. I had his death date, which came from Nathan BROWN’s Civil War pension file. This date was new to her, and has given her renewed hope.
She also had a lot of information about Hannah that I never knew. I’m anxious now to write her back and exchange information.
Moral #1: use an email that will last. Since I published this information on Nathan BROWN’s family several years ago, I’ve had email addresses come and go. But the email address that was associated with this published info has never changed. Suggestion: when you’re publishing info online, or posting to message boards/mailing lists, use a special email address that will not “go away” due to a variety of circumstances. You can obtain free email accounts from Google, Yahoo, Hotmail and others.
Moral #2: share your information. You might have the missing piece of the puzzle that another researcher has been searching for. Information can be published/shared in a variety of methods:
- Publish your own website. (Takes a little more time and know-how though)
- Publish a selected GEDCOM. Many sites will publish your data for free, some for a fee. ie: WorldConnect, Pedigree Resource File, TNG5, etc.
Cautions: Be careful not to publish information on living individuals. If you use Legacy Family Tree’s web creation tools to create your web pages, you’ll be happy to know that it has the option to automatically remove information from living persons. If you plan to share information with others via a GEDCOM, make sure that in the GEDCOM Export screen, you select to suppress the details for living people:
Do you have a success story resulting from sharing your information? Please write to us by leaving a comment below.
Have my family tree published on the Internet. Started to do this manually already 1998, but with now 2115 persons and 836 unique family names from the 738 different family branches it was a relief to now have the assistance by Legacy 5.0. One of my great grandfather’s brothers, Gustaf Fredrik Andersson, immigrated to America. I received an e-mail from [name omitted] in Omaha, Nebraska telling me that he thought we were related. I quote from his mail.
“Lars, since I last e-mailed you, about if we might be related, I have since found some other information you might be interested in. Your Johannes Andersson – b. 3-3-1842 was apparently my great-grandfathers brother. My great-grandfather was Gustaf Fredrik Andersson, b. 1-30-1846. He came to the USA in 1884 with his wife and two children. Three more children were born here, one of them being my grandfather. Are you interested in hearing more?”
And we were relatives indeed! See http://www.ekdahl.org/karldenstore/1214.htm Without the family tree on the internet we had never found each other.