We All Need a Charlie in Our Corner

 

During this month, while I've been pursuing the challenge of identifying my Townsend fourth great-grandparents, a steady stream of emails has been going back and forth between me and a fellow genea-blogger. Charlie Purvis of Carolina Family Roots has been sending me links of material he's found—on my Townsend ancestors. And I'm sending back links of what I've found, based on what he discovered. It's been an ongoing dialog as I work my way towards a well-substantiated answer to my question, "Who were the parents of Delaney Townsend Charles?"

We all need a Charlie in our corner when we are struggling with research problems. Even though technology has streamlined family history research to an incredibly amazing degree—with more developments and resources to come—our own two eyes cannot be everywhere, all at once. With the billions upon billions of digitized document pages coming online (or still behind paywalls in private collections), we can hone our skills and specialize in one area. But we can't know it all.

That's where crowdsourcing the answers comes in. And I am hoping that we'll see a swing back towards cooperative group effort in finding the specific resources each one of us needs. 

When the online genealogy giants came into being and we all swooned to think how much of our sleuthing could be done at home—pajamas, bunny slippers and cup of hot chocolate in hand—the unintentional corollary was a move away from group effort toward individual pursuit. We could find almost anything (perhaps with the right subscription) at any time of day or night. Who needed help?!

At first, we saw vestiges of the old genealogical queries—think Everton's Genealogical Helper on steroids—translated into digital form on sites like Genealogy.com or RootsWeb. Those, however, eventually atrophied from (presumable) lack of use, or due to prohibitive operating costs for what had been envisioned as a nonprofit volunteer effort. We lost our way to talk with each other about the families we were seeking.

I've been lately encouraged, in our local genealogical society efforts, by the response to the invitation to just come together to "talk genealogy." No agenda, no special speaker—just talk about where our research has taken us lately, and where we are stuck. An easy time to share notes, great resources, unexpected discoveries, that is something we do now, once a month. Special Interest Groups are like that, too: a way for smaller groups to exchange information on a specific research focus.

Connecting one on one, though, has super-charged the effort. Of course, it helps to write a blog, where others can put their surnames in a search engine and discover a link to just the blog post they need. Blogger Patrick Jones of Frequent Traveler Ancestry and I connected on our mutual Carter roots, initiating a volley of emails between us, full of useful resources, when I was researching the puzzles in that line.

Blogging is not the only way to connect with other researchers, thankfully—though posting a comment on a key blog entry you've found can help, even if you don't write your own blog. There are other ways to connect with fellow researchers and become the kind of research partner who supercharges progress for others. This month, our local genealogical society will be featuring a speaker on using family history groups on Facebook and other social media to connect with those distant cousins we all wish we could find. I love this speaker's subtitle: "Even if you hate Facebook." Yes, I'm in that camp, too—but I've encountered some wonderful people (and unbelievable results) by venturing into that social media corner.

Back during those early years of online genealogy—I'm talking 1990s here, when they only had wood-burning computers—I met a wonderful researcher who shared roots with my mother-in-law's Gordon line. She was a semi-retired professor of history at a key university, and liked to use her summer breaks for road trips to research those Gordon roots. We struck up an online conversation that lasted for years, until debilitating health got the best of her and eventually claimed her life. 

Thankfully, I am now seeing signs on the horizon that we are beginning to emerge from our genea-caves to connect with other researchers and share resources as a sort of ongoing conversation. Whether we are doing so in person or via online connections, the important part is: work together on the research problems that have us stuck. Find someone who is languishing on the same family line and offer help, either as a "Giving Back" approach in thanks for all that others did to help us when we got started, or a "paying it forward" gesture, knowing well that we'll hit more rough patches in our future research. Teamwork can supercharge our progress.