Where are you?

[John]

Hi,
it does help to help if those offering suggestions and help know where the enquirer is located as available resources vary from country to country. For instance, it might be reasonable to suggest that somebody in the UK should visit their local library, but totally useless for somebody in Australia to do this.
There is provision for this information in the user profile, it isn't nessasary to include a town, country will do.
Remember that unlike mailing lists, we see no address to give clues as to where the poster is.

John

[Pam Downes]

Just to expand on John's theme, but on a different angle.

When you're requesting help, PLEASE remember to tell us everything you know, and everywhere you've looked.
"My granny was Freda Smith. I can't find her birth certificate/her on the census" etc tells us nothing.
For starters - is Freda Smith her maiden name or married name?
Do you know when she died, and how old she was when she died, so therefore have an approximate year of birth?
Have you looked on FreeBMD, the full GRO Index, which census have you looked at, have you tried variant spellings of the name?
I try to help but get very annoyed when I spend time looking-up various resources and then typing out an answer only to get the response 'oh I've looked there'. If I spent five minutes every day on a query to which I got the 'been there' response then over the course of a year I would have wasted 30 hours of my time - yeah, hard to believe isn't it? How much of my own research could I have done in those 30 hours?
So, write your query on a piece of paper. Two hours later go back to it and re-read it as if someone was asking you for help. Sure as eggs is eggs you will find that you've missed out some detail. (I speak with certainty because I've done it myself.) Then re-write your query and, if necessary, wait and re-read.

If you think from this that I resent helping people, then the answer is no, I don't. I enjoy it, and consider it part of 'my debt' to the genealogical community. Where would any of us be without FreeBMD for example? I can't transcribe for them, but I can extract strays from census- one of whom might belong to a FreeBMD transcriber.

So please, just think carefully before you ask us to spend those 5 minutes. Make sure that you get your money's worth :) by providing as much information as possible.

Pam Downes