Thought I'd take a minute to mention some of RootsWeb's sites and message boards
that I have found useful.
Most of you have discovered Joyce Tice's Tri-Counties Genealogy and History
site,
www.rootsweb.com/~srgp/jmtindex.htm, which covers Bradford Co., PA, extensively,
has lots on Tioga Co., PA, and a growing amount on Chemung Co., NY. I visit
every few days and check out "What's New". A number of us are subscribers
to
her associated PABRADFO mail list, but Joyce prefers the people primarily rely
on the web site itself and only use her mai list for more transient questions
of researchers.
Most of you will by now have discovered RootsWeb's many message boards for surnames
and counties and WorldConnect's family trees. But there are a number of there
offerings that you might like to try, if you haven't yet.
If you go to
www.rootsweb.com and page down till you see "Message Boards",
click
on the option "Topics". You will first see a number of yellow folders, such
as "Genealory Software", each of which contains links to several specialized
message boards. Below the yellow folders, you will see links to individual
boards that may be of interest. "Found Family Heirlooms" deals with things
like photos and bibles that someone has found and wants to give to a descendant.
I use "Lost Family and Friends". I've mentioned before that we are warned
by RootsWeb to be guarded about putting data on living people on their message
boards or in mail list messages, but they make and exception for that board
and for the Adoptions ones. The latter being primarily for adoptees searching
for their birth parents. Browse aroung and you will be surpirsed at all the
different kinds of stuff available.
Many of the message boards and mail lists are paired - both for a specific surname
or geographical location. That is, any message posted to the message board
is automatically forwarded to the associated mail list. But many mail lists
have no associated message board, and vice-versa.
With only a couple of exceptions, all the mail lists are archived. I don't
want to receive messages from a lot of mail lists, but from time to time I do
check the archives of a number of mai lists.
Returning to RootsWeb's home page, note that "Mailing Lists" on the left is
sancwiched between "WorldConnect" and "Message Boards".
"Interactive Search"
gives access to the archives of a mail list for searches. You select a year
and form a search query. "Treaded Archives" are for browsing. They show a
month's worth at a time, and show the hierarchy of messages and response. Either
option allows you to supply the name of a specific list or search for one.
Or you might be surprised if you take options "Surname List Finder" or
"Index
(Browse All Lists)"
One of my favorite RootsWeb web sites is their Social Security Death Index Interactive
Search page,
htp://ssdi.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi
The Advanced Search capabilities of this are awesome. If you know someone's
name and birth date, you can find out their death date and place of last residence.
Or with the name and death info, you can find the birth date (often just month
and year). It's great if you don't know a woman's married name, but know her
first name and birth date. If there are too many candidates, you can refine
your search further if you know their last residence or what state their SSN
was issued in. And with dates, you don't need the complete date, you can let
the month and/or day default to "Any". It's not unsusal for the date you
"know"
to be correct to differ from their dates by a day of two. My biggest problem
using the advanced search screen is forgetting to remove some of the terms from
one search before proceeding to another. It's also good to "relax" some of
the search terms if you don't find a hit. For example, sometimes the first
and middle names someone uses are actually reversed from the order in their
legal name. One of my cousins was surprised to learn her mother's name was
actually "Gisela", not "Marcella" as she had always been know by. Of
course
many of the folks we are trying to research never had social security numbers
and thus are not present.
One of the handiest features of this SSDI is the ability to read and write
"Post-It"
notes for an individual in the index. You can leave additional data for others
to use, oras I often do, leave your e-mail address for others researching that
person to contact. You make up a code, so that only you can delete of modify
a Post-It. I recommend using the same code for all your Post-Its, so that it's
easy to keep track of.
Try out some of these ideas and let us know your favorites.