It's time for this week's Ancestry Quick Tip Jamboree! Thanks to everyone who has sent in a Quick Tip. Please keep them coming so that we can keep this tradition going. You can send your tips to: ADNeditor@ancestry.com.

Quick Tips may be reprinted, with credit to the submitter, in other Ancestry publications, so if you do not want your tip included in a publication other than the Ancestry Daily News and Ancestry Weekly Digest, please state so clearly in your message.

Have a great day!
Juliana

Survey of Resources

Though Ancestry.com is working diligently, there literally are millions of records not yet available on the Internet. So every local society should gather together a full and complete list of every single local source that might help a researcher, including even local historians and writers with personal collections and information not yet published or otherwise available.

Such a list, when made locally available and also placed on the society website, will not only bring researchers to the town, the area, and to local businesses, but also will be immensely helpful to everyone with roots in that place.

Recently, I did a seminar in a western Virginia County. At my request, the local society members diligently made such a complete list. They found, even to their own surprise, that there was a total of forty-two local sources and (or) sets of records, including those sources in their courthouse. My Internet search revealed that of that number, there were twenty that could not be found on the Internet.

Since the publication of that list, the latest report reveals a substantial increase in society membership by those living far away, and a noticeable benefit to those businesses near the courthouse, at the local museum, in the motels and at the library. All have benefited from that effort, and there is NO downside.

Genealogy without documentation is nothing.

Paul Drake JD
Genealogist & Author

Post-ems

The Ancestry World Tree post-ems are great for adding comments to someone else's database, but I use them on my own family tree too, to note errors and omissions that will be corrected when I post my next update. This is a quick and convenient way to prevent bad data from sitting online uncorrected without having to re-upload my database every time I tweak it.

Leslie Nelson

Bring the PDA

I loved the article on what to do sitting with the patient in the hospital. I have been the patient extensively in recent years and I would never wish to change places with my caregiver of fifty-four years but you have given me enough material to consider that I will know how to eliminate several persistent piles.

Taking a PDA with your tree on it enables one to check information when away from your desktop.

Thanks for your good work.

Dick