The tree of our family that I placed on the Internet got some use recently.
First, we had a near miss. A descendant of an Albert Fowler, found our
tree and hoped she was a descendant of our Albert and Sarah Hazlett
Fowler. After reading our stuff she thought it would be great to be
part of our family. After a fair amount of correspondence back and
forth, and comparing notes, we decided her Albert was not the same
person as ours.
A couple of days ago, one of the recipients of our 2005 Campbell Reunion
Association Report in the mail and initially thought it was some kind of
scam. But recognized a number of the names mentioned in the letter.
So, she checked out some of the Internet links mentioned in the letter.
She was very impressed with what she saw, and enthusiastically wants to
help fill in some of the blanks in our data.
I've gotten several e-mail responses to the letters I'm "snail"
mailing. That will save us money in the future -- fewer 39 cent
stamps. But I've been writing custom notes on many of the letters
asking about missing genealogical data -- and I've been getting quite a
bit back. So every few days, I update the Internet copy of our tree
with more names, dates, and places. And add data on living people to my
data base -- as you know, RootsWeb restricts data published on their
site as regards living people -- unless you have written permission from
them.
It's a nice kind of "vicious circle." The more names in the CaPaNe tree
on the Internet, the more cousins will find us, the more names we'll
get, and on and on.