Questions and Answers: Dos and don'ts

With the self-isolation happening due to COVID-19 a number of us have been working on our family trees. This also means that many have been hitting those proverbial brick walls. One way of working our ways around, over, or through these genealogical challenges is to ask for assistance from others. With social distancing in effect, a common place I see this happening on is in the various genealogy and family history groups on Facebook.

I've touched upon asking questions and giving answers on Facebook several years ago in Comments about Facebook Comments and Genealogy and Answering Facebook Genealogy Questions but I think it is time to address it once again.

Questions

When looking for assistance in your research, whether it be on Facebook, in some other online forum, or by e-mail, here are a few tips:

Only ask one question at a time

• This can be really hard since often you are chasing a number of challenges with that family or person. Asking multiple questions in the same post can confuse possible responders since they have to untangle the information you have provided.

Be clear in your question

• Make sure that you actually state a question in your post. Preferably the question should be the first sentence in your post.
• Is the information that you are posting understandable? Using proper sentences and paragraphs can really add readability to your post.We are not all e.e. cummings. Upper and lower case are appreciated.

Provide some details

• When you post your question you need to assume that whomever reads the question knows nothing about the family or person. Some of the details may include:
• Location
• Dates or date ranges
• Names
• You might be surprised how often someone asks for help researching an ancestor and they leave off the person's name in the query.
• Tell us where you have looked or if this your first foray into family research.
• However, don't overwhelm the reader with a ten paragraph treatise with a dump of everything you have learned to date.
• If asking about an image or picture then make sure it is as clear as possible so that key details can be picked up. Also, respect the copyright of the owner of the image. Provide details about where you got the image so that others may, if they have access to the source, review it in situ.

Have you done your homework?

• Part of asking a question is that you must have done some of the work first. For example, if asking about locating civil registration records have you learned about the privacy restrictions for that locale?
• Does the question violate the rules of the group? Many online genealogy groups and forums don't allow questions about the living.

Answers

As responders we also have some guidelines we should follow:

Read all the answers posted by others

• The question may already be answered by someone else.
• On Facebook you can "like" a post and that can help add weight to an answer that has been already given. It also provides some feedback to the other responder that their input has been valuable.

Are you answering the question?

• If the question is about a baptism you probably shouldn't be talking about consulting civil registration records or explaining about civil registration privacy restrictions.
• I believe that it is perfectly acceptable that if you can't answer the question directly but have suggestions as to where the poster can look next then you should post that information.

Provide details

• Don't just post a brief answer and leave it at that. Follow the saying:

Give a person a fish, and you'll feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, and you've fed them for a lifetime

• Give a brief explanation of where you found the information. If it was tricky to locate using a genealogy site's search system, give the key details of your search process.
• Also don't just give an answer like "Check the ____ records". Make sure you add additional information such as where those records can be found. Are they online or are they located in a building somewhere? Remember, often the original poster doesn't have the knowledge or experience that you have gained over time.
• Respect the copyright on any images that you may include in your answer. For any images that you do post from other web sites, try to include the link to the image. The original poster and other readers might not have known about that resource. 

Finally, and this applies to everyone and even though it shouldn't need to be said, be polite.