So if you're a message board user, now is a good time to make sure your e-mail address is up-to-date and your posts are current. If you haven't posted to the message boards, it's a perfect time to start.

Let's take a look at some ways we can leverage the launch to improve our chances of finding that long-lost cousin with the information that could break down some of those brick walls.

Finding Your Old Posts
If you've posted before, step one will be to locate your old posts. In the message board box on the main Community page click on Try Our Advanced Search. There, enter your name in the box that says Author of Message and click Find. You should end up with a list of all your posts that you can review and update if necessary.

Update Your E-Mail
One of the great things about message boards is that your message stays out there for people who join the search much later. So if Cousin Myrtis is finally bitten by the genealogy bug years from now, she can find you through your post of today. The only hitch is that your e-mail address needs to be current or she won't be able to send you all that info from the family Bible.

As part of the overall updates to the boards, the “Board Profile” will be replaced by your Ancestry "My Public Profile.” This means that your member name and the e-mail associated with your Ancestry account will replace the current “Post Name” and “Post E-mail” as the author and contact for your posts. For this reason it's important that you're e-mail address is current in the “My Accounts” section. Also, you may wish to update your username and e-mail address to something that you don't mind being associated with all of your message board posts.

Updating Posts
Now say you put a query out there looking for info on your great-grandpa John Smith. You knew his father's name at the time of the post (he was another John Smith), but not the mother and had no clue as to his place of birth. It would really help if you could provide some info that would make him stand out from the other bazillion John Smiths, but back in 2003 when you posted it, that was all you had.

Now let's say you discovered his mother was named Hildegard Hemperphistle and that he had been born in Posen, Cook County, Illinois. (I think all ancestors with common names should have been required to marry spouses with unusual given names and surnames to at least give us a fair chance at identifying them!) How do we get that information into the post so that when that nice wave of searchers anxious to try out the updated message boards comes through, they'll be able to find your post? You can do this by replying to the original post with your new information added. Not only will this allow you to be found by the Smiths who know about the Hemperphistle-Smith marriage, but Hemperphistle cousins will also be able to find you through their searches as well.

With the launch of the message boards you will be able to go back and edit live posts that have not been replied to, adding and correcting information.

Keys To A Good Post
Posting effective messages is the key to your success, and there are certain elements that should be included in your post.

• A good subject line. If you post to the Smith list that you're “Looking for Smiths,” you're not going to stand out. After all, presumably everyone on the list is “looking for Smiths.” Give them as much detail as possible to help reel in the right cousins. Something like this:

  SMITH, Joseph Z., 1838-1864, Eng>NY>Iowa

  If you're not certain of the dates, you can estimate and use ca. (circa) to note it.
  
  
• Give them details upfront, listing who you are looking for, where and when, so they don't have to read on only to discover they have the wrong person five paragraphs later. Then you can go into more detail, explaining where you've searched, sharing family stories you'd like to verify, etc.
  
  
• Re-read your post from another perspective. Pretend you're the answer to your genealogical prayers coming to respond to your post. Re-read it and be sure that you have included all the necessary information. Since we all know our own ancestors so well, it's easy to forget that other people don't and omit crucial information.

Sit Back And Wait?
Now that your posts are all in order, you can sit back and wait for people to find you. It's basically free advertising for you. But I'm guessing that's not what you'll be doing. If you're like me, you're going to be off searching for ancestors as soon as you're done. We family historians typically aren't of the “sit and wait” variety.

Learn more about the improved boards.

Juliana Smith has been the editor of Ancestry.com newsletters for more than seven years and is author of The Ancestry Family Historian's Address Book. She has written for Ancestry Magazine and Genealogical Computing. Juliana can be reached by e-mail at: Juliana@Ancestry.com, but she regrets that her schedule does not allow her to assist with personal research.

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by Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak

Sounds strange to say “twentieth century ancestors,” doesn't it? There are those who would scoff at the notion of research within the last century being true genealogy. And fortunately, many of our twentieth century ancestors are still very much with us! In fact, many of you reading this are technically twentieth century ancestors yourselves.

But still, a lot can happen in a hundred years; whole generations can enter the stage and exit within that time frame. So how do you go about finding those most recent of ancestors--or even, some living kin?

In general, contemporary research is easier than distant, simply because the more contemporary the times, the more plentiful the paper trail. That is, unless you factor in privacy concerns and increasing restrictions on access to records.

I wrestle with these restrictions on a daily basis due to my work on the U.S. Army's Repatriation project. Since I need to locate living family members of men who served in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, I am immersed in a world of twentieth century ancestors--and other assorted relatives. So based on my experience, here are a few suggestions:

• Surround and conquer. Don't obsess on the individual you're seeking. Find others associated with him or her and gradually work your way closer. Collateral relatives are a good start, but so are others who went to the same school or church, served in the same military unit, or hail from the same hometown and happen to sport the same surname (you'd be surprised how often folks of a given surname can tell you about unrelated people of the same name just because they get each other's mail, share the same veterinarian, or otherwise overlap lives in some fashion.)
  
  
• Make friends with census records--especially the every-name ones. At present, Ancestry.com offers every-name indexes for the U.S. Federal census records for 1900, 1920, and 1930 (one wonders when 1910 might make its debut!). I conducted an experiment tracking resources consulted in ten successfully resolved cases, and census records were pivotal in 80 percent of them. Of course, it helps that they're amazingly useful in terms of the surround-and-conquer principle. One of my favorite tactics is finding toddlers in the 1930 census and using other resources (perhaps the U.S Phone and Address Directories, 1993-2002 or U.S. Public Records Index) to find them today!
  
  
• Follow the trail of the deceased to find the living. Since the living are so well protected with various privacy laws, make good use of the Social Security Death Index and obituaries--for those associated with the person you're seeking. For example, if I have a case for a soldier who was born in 1928, I might find the names of several of his siblings in the 1930 census and then check the SSDI to see if any of his siblings have passed on. If so, I might get an indication of where the family (or at least, some portion of it) is today. And I can use the SSDI details to try to locate an obituary. They're not quite as common as they used to be, but when they're located, details provided might include anything from married names of sisters to the name of the funeral home that handled the burial. All of these can be bridges to contacts today. And for those who might be concerned that this method could be used by those wishing to commit fraud (believe it or not, I actually had a librarian sternly inform me recently that obituaries are private records!), let me assure you that crooks aren't willing to work this hard!

Happy hunting!

Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, co-author (with Ann Turner) of Trace Your Roots with DNA: Using Genetic Tests to Explore Your Family Tree (as well as In Search of Our Ancestors, Honoring Our Ancestors and They Came to America), can be contacted through www.genetealogy.com and www.honoringourancestors.com.

Upcoming Events Where Megan Will Be Speaking
(May 6, 2006, New City, New York)
--- Roots in the Boot
(July 15, 2006, Pittsburgh, PA)

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from George G. Morgan

Have you ever wondered on what day of the week your great-grandmother was born? Or have you wondered whether someone famous was born on the same date as your father? An excellent perpetual calendar resource on the Web can be found at the Calendarhome.com 10,000 year calendar website. Here you can select a century, a year, and a month, and click to display a calendar. Then, click on the day of the month if you want to learn the moon phase, historical events on that date, the names of famous people born on that date, and much more information.

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1841 Census Facts
As the 1841 census for England has just been added to Ancestry.com, I thought I would send a few tips.

Best wishes,
Anne

Not There or Not In The Index?
I know this has been covered before, but for new researchers, it is important for them to know that just because they can't find someone in the index, it doesn't mean they aren't there. I helped a friend work on his McClain family in Texas, and I knew they were in Trinity County but they were not listed in the 1860 index. (This was before Ancestry indexed it and we had to rely on the books in the library.) I decided to check out the census for Trinity County page by page. Sure enough, there was the entire family, names very easy to read, and not one of them had been listed in the book. (Somehow the transcriber had skipped over a whole group of names.) So, don't give up if you can't find them in the index.

Another example was in locating my grandfather Leigh in the 1920 index. The transcriber took the "L" to be an "S." I had to locate him by going through each page of the index. Be sure to try different spellings, and don't give up. If you are positive that your ancestor is in a certain place, and the indexes are of no help, search the census and you should find them.

If not, then maybe you need to rethink your assumption of where they are. Maybe the county or state lines changed, depending on the year. These little idiosyncrasies make genealogy fun for me. I just love the challenges.

Nancy Richardson,
Houston, TX

Check The Front and Back of Registers
After checking nineteenth-century marriage records at the courthouse, I thought I had seen all of the "E-F-G" entries. Quite by accident I skipped to the last page of the marriage register book and got a surprise. Since the early entries were recorded in the book “as they happened” during each calendar year, when the recorder ran out of space on a particular page, they moved to the back of the register (after the "Z" section), and began recording again. Now I always check alphabetically for the letter I'm checking for in the front, and then I skip to the back section just to see if there are other entries back there. I have found several records this way that I had not found in my previous searches.

John Cox

If you have a suggestion you would like to share with other researchers, send it to: Juliana@Ancestry.com. Thanks to all of this week's contributors!

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 Weekly Journal please state so clearly in your message.

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The year was 1914 and the Ford Model T was the automobile of choice for most Americans and due to Henry Ford's revolutionary production lines, the company was turning out a complete car every ninety-three minutes. Workers were paid a minimum of $5.00 a day, which was double what most other manufacturers were paying, and Henry Ford reduced shifts from nine hours to eight to allow for three shifts.

On May 9, President Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation that made the second Sunday in May a national holiday--Mother's Day. The proclamation called upon government officials to "display the United States flag on all government buildings and the people of the United States to display the flag at their homes, or other suitable places on the second Sunday in May, as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country . . ." The ad for Gude Bros. Co., florists which appeared in the May 10, 1914 edition of "The Washington Post" (Washington, D.C.) suggests that readers should wear "White Flowers For Mothers' Memory" and "Bright Flowers For Mothers Living."

The headlines were more somber in late June. On June 28, the eyes of the world turned to Europe upon the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. One month later, World War I began as Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.

President Wilson issued a declaration that the U.S. would remain neutral in the conflict, but government actions and response tended to favor the Allied forces of Britain, France, and Russia over the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. (See the Library of Congress Learning pages for more information.)

The War had an influence on music and popular tunes included It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary and Keep the Home Fires Burning. For lighter fare, movie-goers could see Charlie Chaplin as he introduced his famous "Little Tramp" character to audiences for the first time in Kid Auto Races at Venice. And everyone's favorite ape-man came to life as Edgar Rice Burroughs published Tarzan of the Apes.

Another highlight of the year came when, 422 years after Columbus sought passage to the east by sailing west, a new route between the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean was established when the Panama Canal opened, shortening voyages between San Francisco and New York by around 7,800 miles.

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If you'd like to see your ancestor's photograph in the Ancestry Weekly Journal, send it to juliana@ancestry.com.

Contributed by: Nancy Simmons Roberson Susie Phoebe Simmons, ca. 1895. Daughter of Andrew Lincoln Simmons and Susan Lavina Cokeley Harrisville, Ritchie County, West Virginia	Contributed by: Melvin L. Graham III The photo, taken ca. 1894, is of his great-aunt Ruby Crane, b. 01 November 1889 and his maternal grandmother, Nellie Crane, b. 31 October 1886

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Finding Answers In U.S. Census Records
by Loretto Dennis Szucs and Matthew Wright

This book is a guide to help researchers effectively locate and use abundant and valuable U.S. Census records, whether it is population schedules, state and local census schedules, or special census schedules. The book primarily discusses each type of census and explores what specific points a researcher needs to keep in mind when working with them.

Normally Finding Answers in U.S. Census Records retails for $16.95, but today you can buy it in the Ancestry.com Store for $13.95.