Week 31: Help

Facebook is a great source of help for genealogists.  Here’s the link to this list of genealogy Facebook pages https://moonswings.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/genealogy-on-facebook-jan-2021.pdf

Many of us use Facebook to share family pictures, inexplicable photos of unremarkable meals, cute pet pictures, and so forth.  Many of us also use it to share political views or fire insults into the universe.  However, Facebook can provide help for a variety of hobbies, including genealogy. This obviously does not come as a surprise to those of you who are reading this on Facebook.

I belong to more than 100 genealogy FB groups, although I don’t visit most of them regularly.  I joined them when I was researching a specific location, surname, or historical era, and then didn’t unjoin them when my research moved on.

Here are a few examples of how this has worked for me:

I posted this query on July 29, 1917

Within a couple of hours, here’s the response I received, along with my reaction to it:

Here’s another thread from a couple of years ago:

And here’s an example of how group members can “pay back” for the assistance they’ve received.

Here’s one of the responses I received to this post:

We all like to feel smart.  We also like to be appreciated.  I have found that genealogists are very generous with their time to help other researchers, because they know how much they have appreciated the help they’ve received in the past.  The Facebook hive-mind is very knowledgeable and they LOVE to share what they’ve learned.