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Val on the Wheeler mailing list posted this in February. The Wheeler list
had been as inactive as the Closson list. Since this posting there have been
about ten messages a day on the mailing list. Several brick walls and other
connections were made. Val gave me permission to send this to the Closson
mailing list. Hope this helps to get our list active again.
Ann in New Mexico USA
"In my last experience with a list that had a lot of UK researchers lurking
and a lot of US researchers very active, I encouraged the UK people to speak
up - and it worked wonders! (up to a point...) This sort of thing is
probably not confined to the UK/US differences, it's probably different
counties and states that get ignored as well... and ummmm.... our ancestors
traveled!
My experience before was that people were sitting there belonging to the
same list, but not talking about their families because they weren't finding
anything in common with the ones whe WERE listing a lot. Two people who'd
been members for some time found that their families of the same surname had
come from villages a mile away from each other, and almost certainly
connected, after I revved them up a bit. They then followed up with each
other off list though, and didn't share that info on the list either!
If something is in the archives of a list it's accessible to people to
contact about it for years to come, but if it's private emails, we never get
to know.
I'm not really sure why we belong to a list if we're not going to use it...
Are there any more lurkers out there??? I'd love to know who your people
are... it just might mean something!
Val Burge, researching WHEELER's in Dilton Marsh and Short Street,
Wiltshire... some of whom disappeared because they went elsewhere...