Tip Page for June 2003
Whether you get a useful answer to your important genealogical question often depends on you. How you write a query can make the difference. A good query will ask a specific question about a specific person/family who lived in a specific place at a specific time. Of course, you don't know all the specific information--if you did, you wouldn't be writing the query--but the more specific you can be about what you do know, the better. The key questions in genealogy are who, where, and when. You're likely to be asking for more information about one of these in a query, but you're also likely to know something about each of them. An example and some guidelines:
(1) State what you want to know clearly. "I am searching for Matilda SMITH's parents." That tells us who.
(2) Provide specific information that can help someone find the information or connect your Matilda to his/her Smith family. "She was born in New York in 1825; she married Peter VALENTINE in 1848 in Herkimer County, NY; she and Peter were living in DeKalb County, Illinois in 1850 and moved to Bremer County, Iowa about 1854, where Matilda died in 1894." That tells us where and when.
(3) Stay focused. Don't ask every question you have about Matilda or her family in this one query. Don't tell every detail you know about her. What you include in the query should be directly useful to finding the answer to your question. A partial exception is that you may want to include your relationship to the subject: "Matilda was my great-grandmother," for instance.
(4) Read, rewrite, and reread your query. Ask yourself: Did I spell the words correctly, did I check the dates, did I ask a clear question, did I include the right information and only that. If the answer to any of these questions is "oops," rewrite--and ask the questions again.
Some online guides that can help you write a successful query are Writing a Productive Genealogy Query; Write Successful Genealogical Queries; and two articles by Michael John Neill, Before You Post and After You Post. The USGenWeb also provides the guide About Queries and Look Ups.
If you're researching one of the many families who came to Marion County from the Netherlands, you may find these sites of particular interest. DutchGenealogy.com has online resources, CDs you can buy, research tips, a discussion list, and links that include worldwide resources and archival records. The Dutch Research Corner provides research information (e.g., on names, Dutch history and customs, printed genealogies, and church records) and links (primarily to genealogies, but also to Dutch-English language resources, societies, and message boards or mailing lists). The Basics: A Guide to Finding Your Dutch Genealogical Roots is part of the Dutch Heritage Website done by Vanderheide Publishing. The Basics by Tony Hofstee has 25 chapters that introduce you to the records available, naming practices, using the LDS resources, Dutch calendar differences, and more.
Finding the men in your family may be hard, but most of us have discovered that finding the women is even harder. Invisible Women Ancestors is devoted to "tips for tracing the women in your family tree." Christina Schaefer's The Hidden Half of the Family (Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore) inspired the article Finding Female Ancestors, which describes why it's hard to find them, as well as suggesting how to find them. There are links to other articles at the end of the review, including one written by Sharon DeBartolo Cormack, the author of A Genealogist's Guide to Discovering Your Female Ancestors.
For the mathematically challenged, here are a few little online calculators to help you pin down that date you need. If the tombstone says Grandma was 87 years 3 months and 5 days old when she died, the Birthdate Calculator is the tool for you. If you're reading censuses, go to Calculating Birth Year from Census Information. If you want to know whether you're dealing with Thursday's child (who has far to go) or Sunday's child (who's full of grace), try Calculating the Day of the Week a person was born. And finally here's a free Date Calculator that you can download.
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