Genealogical Queries

Snippet from the Boston Transcript newspaper: Notes and QueriesGenealogical column of The Boston Evening Transcript newspaper, 1914

Prior to the advent of the Internet, family historians posted queries in newspapers, genealogical society newsletters, and other printed publications in an effort to connect with  fellow researchers and distant relatives. Queries posted in highly regarded publications such as The Boston Transcript newspaper and Everton’s Genealogical Helper were widely read by casual and scholarly genealogists alike.

When we genealogists first went online, we tried to replicate what we had done previously in print. Message boards and mailing lists were, therefore, among the earliest uses of the Internet for genealogy, as we quickly realized the much wider audience that could be reached online. If you were online in the early days of the Internet, did you then have the same e-mail address as you do now? Were your user names the same then as today? Mine certainly weren’t. Without a means of linking your earliest e-mail addresses to your current online presence, how would someone interested in the subject of that very old query or post find you today?

My own online genealogical queries date back to 1997, and I continue to use genealogy message boards to develop new leads. Over the years, I’ve made valuable contacts with genealogists of all stripes, and have connected with family I never knew I had. The original idea for Ancestor Roundup was to create an archive of my old posts (regardless of persona) from several sites under one umbrella, and to use those queries as a jumping off point to share further information garnered in the intervening years.

You’ll soon begin finding this information under a separate section of this site. Do check back often as I add to the archive.

[Tap, tap] Is this thing on?

Hello, and welcome to my new corner of cyberspace. I know you’re asking:
Why Ancestor Roundup?”

Allow me to elaborate. When not used in a strictly Western sense, a roundup is defined as a gathering in of scattered persons or things, or a summary of information. Ancestors are those people from whom you descend, people directly related by blood. Without them, you wouldn’t be here.

So, Ancestor Roundup is the gathering in of my ancestors, and a summary of information about them. I want to tell their stories, and share the information I’ve collected in more than twenty-plus years of active genealogical research. While doing so, I hope to give interested readers a glimpse of my research process. I rely heavily on technology when I research and organize my findings, so I expect there will be a fair amount of discussion of technology as it relates to genealogy on this blog as well.

If you discover that we’re related and have information to add to the conversation or copies of original documents or photographs you’d be willing to share, please don’t hesitate to contact me, either by responding to a comment, or by filling out the contact form on my About page.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you find something of value here.