Would You Like A Genealogy Q&A Site? - Fri, 24 Aug 2012

I would love to help you with you Q & A site if you get it up and running. I taught genealogy classes for years at our Adult Education, plus director of Family History Library, plus President of Local genealogy society. I have done research all over United States, heavy on Pennsylvania. Also Switzerland, Germany, Scotland and Scandinavian countries. I host a web site where I have included 3 books I have written. So keep me on your list if you need help. Nita Caffrey

I participated in a similar project that was part of Everton.com when Genealogical Helper was still being published. Fortunately, there was a “moderator” who directed queries to persons with the “proper” expertise when no volunteer came forward. That moderator was quite good at her job as more than once I was asked to answer a question that fell outside of my stipulated areas of expertise and was able to do so.

One concerned finding the precise location of a town along the border between Oklahoma and Arkansas (I specialize in Virginia/West Virginia) that does not appear on modern maps. I suggested the Postal Site Application and Report files for Arkansas and Oklahoma knowing not only that those files often contained lists of the communities served, if not detailed maps of the area, but also that a post office often had a different name than the town in which it was located with the post office name often being the name that survived.

I was later informed that the individual found the answer to his question in those records!

I participated in that program in no small part because even though queries could be asked at no cost, there was also a paid option and the queries also resulted in my getting paid research assignments. I might well see such assignments by participating in this new program, but I saw nothing as I explored the same that offered that option.

When it comes to genealogy there is a clear overall bias on the internet against promoting any fee-based services other than Ancestry or a like company that is primarily offering access to data, and generally “second-hand”, rather than actual research.

Granted, with this still being an alpha, it is perhaps premature to expect a “referral” option, but without a stipulation that the same is intended, I would expect most of the people who would be answering the queries to be amateurs.

I have nothing against amateurs per se, for they still dominate genealogical “publishing”, and I know more than a few “amateurs” I consider to be more competent than individuals who call themselves “professional genealogists”.

Even with the moderation at Everton.com, I was struck by the frequency with which the answers were, if well-intentioned, misinformed.

If questions are to be “removed” for being too specific, will they also be removed for being “WRONG”? I note that it is stipulated that with time, an answer receiving the most votes with move to the top. That suggests to me that any given answer may never be removed, but if it would be, what criteria would be used for making that determination? I don’t know that I like the idea of it being strictly the “most vote” because a “lie” can come to be regarded as “truth” if repeated often enough.

Looking over the sample questions at the actual beta site, along with some of the remarks/explanation for closings, I am concerned that the majority of posted questions are TOO VAGUE, providing too little information for a succinct reply, and I suspect there will be no active moderation to direct a question to a suitable expert.

Quite frankly, without such moderation I would not participate because I suspect that in the majority of instances where I would ask for further information, the detail provided would suggest that I not actually try to answer the question.

For example, I saw only one query that stipulated a specific place and few that gave a time frame. AT A MINIMUM, finding genealogical information in Virginia would require both a date range and location.

The date range is needed to determine whether the information is likely to exist.

For example, civil registration of births and deaths do not begin in Virginia until 1853, with is a gap for most localities from 1896 and 1912, and second, what restrictions on access may apply, there being, for example, an 100 privacy restriction on births.

Prior to 1853, finding a birth date would be largely dependent on locating a tombstone, Bible or church record, though other options are also available, but the tombstone may have been destroyed by nature or man if the family could even have afforded to have one erected, the Bible lost in a fire or discarded because it was handed down through a family that did not have an interest in its history when the surname was different, and most churches do not keep records of birth dates of members.

In Virginia in particular, a location is needed since Virginia is the not the one place in the United States where a city is INDEPENDENT of a county even if completely surrounding it (the 5 boroughs of NYC come closest to the same), so there are multiple places were a given record might be recorded.

Until 1974, the Henrico County, Virginia, courthouse was located both in the city of Richmond and roughly 4 blocks from the city courthouse. I have seen in my almost 40 years as a professional genealogist numerous instances where a record that should have been recorded in Henrico County was actually recorded in the city of Richmond and vice versa. There is also a Richmond County. Indeed, there are both a city and county in Virginia named Bedford, Franklin, Fairfax and Roanoke, and like Richmond city and County, Franklin city and County are NOT contiguous.

I recently found an adoption record for a client in the General Court for the city of Richmond. I routinely find such records in a county in its County Court, for which until the adoption of the current state constitution the equivalent court in a city was the Hustings Court!

There are also Virginia towns with the same name as a Virginia county, Washington coming immediately to mind, though the town of Washington would have few records specifically for the town, yet one will find quite a few records there by virtue of the fact it is the seat for the government of Rappahannock County!

To make matters more confusing, there are still a James City and Charles City that are actually COUNTIES, Elizabeth City that was a county but is now a city named HAMPTON, and Alexandria County, now called Arlington, that was distinctly different from the city of Alexandria though they did adjoin, and many mistakenly presume to be a city when it is still a COUNTY.

While these comments might be better posted at the alpha-site given your comments about the requisites for establishing a beta, I suspect that those who share my opinion might never see them if I were to post on the alpha, quite possibly because they would be classified as “off topic”.

Sounded like a great idea so I did get right over to the site. Made the mistake of browsing around in Area 51 and Stack Exchange, got kinda turned off. Didn’t get the impression that I’m the kind of “expert” they want or welcome. I would expect to have a lot more questions than answers and I doubt that many of the questions would have global significance.

I’m probably not even a “serious amateur”, just a guy with lots of family records and an itch to get them into a computer. I’ve used Legacy for several years and dabbled with Roots Magic, tried to get serious about sources and experienced all the frustrations you’ve promised to relieve in Behold, but I’m a user, not a genealogy philosopher. If the site won’t let me ask questions like “Is anyone working on the John Doe who was born in LeMars Iowa in 1905″, it’s not going to have much relevance for me.

I might go ahead and sign up anyway, just to cast a few votes for establishment, but don’t think I’ll last long. It’s too bad too, because I’ve been trying to find a path between lust for the resources of Ancestry et al with antipathy toward the prevalent model where individuals find and publish the data for free, and company X gets rich from it. I’ve looked (briefly) at several of the previous and current attempts to to provide non-profit venues for public exposure, but it seems there’s always a loop hole or an ulterior motive.

(If that got too far off-topic, feel free to edit or delete.)

Regards - Dave