General Chat

I received a message this morning from another GR member.

Asked for information, we might have a match. Asked? When I make contact, I give as much information as necessary, such as birthplace, year of birth, parents names etc etc.

I replied, asked where & when this person was born, and if possible the names of his parents.

Got a response.......... basically said he was reluctant to give information because he'd been researching a long time, didnt want to share info yet.

What???????? He wants info from me, but won't give me any!!?? :-P

I don't think I'll bother responding to him again.

His loss if he will not give the basic information needed to match

Weird! You'd have expected a minute amount of info from him :-S

He gave me a tiny bit.............

His name, and that he had six siblings.

Didn't say when he was born or where.

I've got a lot more than that.......... but I'm spitting the dummy and not sharing! :-D :-0

Make sure you tell him that!

"Good on ya Sheila". :-D

Or as we say it here, Punch and Judy way... "That's the way to do it".

Tell him that you know the feeling as you've been researching for 30 years

When I first joined GR way back when, I granted access to loads of contacts who I never heard from again.
I later changed all the setting on my GR acct so that long forgotten contacts were no longer informed that I had uploaded a new gedcom.

I visited the GRO in December and found outstanding BDMs.
(Mostly post 1901)
These were records for a family who suddenly materialised in an area of Scotland, very far from their established roots and of course it took me a very long time in the research room to locate the info

After uploading a new gedcom, I checked for matches and unsurprisingly there were none
About a week later, I checked again, and found that an old contact had added all the info to his tree, including one or two exact typo errors that I had made,

I realised that this person must be checking my tree every now and then to extract new info!

At that point, I went through every single contact who had access to my tree and removed it.

Unfortunately there is this perception built up that everyone out there is bad and out to 'steal' your information. My experience it that it is far from the case.

Over the years that I have been a member on here I have had contact with around one thousand other members and of those, I have been given access to over six hundred trees. A lesser number, around four hundred, have been granted access to my tree.

In all that time I have only ever come across one name gatherer, and one other who tried to add my immediate family without permission. Both got the old heave ho.

:-D Claire

I did my first "research" in the 1960s! Not exactly research, but that's when I started getting interested.

My Mother's older sister had access to some records through her job, so I wrote and asked her if she could find out the names of my great-grandparents.

She did exactly what I asked....... names. No years or places of birth. Frustrating!

The first certificate I bought was my grandfather's birth entry (1892) which had his parents' marriage date.......... and since then I've spent so much on documents from Scotland's People, I could have had a trip to Scotland.

:-D

I'll share information, but I really get annoyed with people who send messages like "tell me more about your John Blank".

In the earlier days of my tree I agreed to swap access with someone. He said he was at work but if I opened my tree to him, which I agreed to do, he would give me access to his tree as soon as he got home. This he did and he was the only person on it!

My other little mistake was I did loads of look ups from Parish record CD's that I own and gave a lot of info to someone who shared part of my tree. In exchange he was own going to send me a copy of a photo of my great grandmother. I was quite excited as I hadn't got any photos of this lady. It never arrived.

Not put off, I'm still always happy to share relevant information.

Ah! the age old question, covered countless times.
Give and take or sit in your kennel gnawing your own bone?