If youre been researching your family tree for any length of time, youve no doubt come across (and perhaps even used) genealogy forums, discussion groups or mailing lists. While these can be a grand resource for essentially putting other everybody to work on your research, the results may sometimes be, shall we say, "uneven." But the problem can not be the board, forum or list youre using. It might not even be that youre asking terribly difficult questions, or looking for incredibly obscure pieces of data . Instead, your lack of results could be a simple case of not experience the proper way to utilize these incredibly powerful tools.

When you post a query online, youre asking your question of thousands of many people around the world. Amazingly enough, considering that all the people are strangers to each other, youll fairly often get long and helpful answers to your queries. But if youre not, if youve been affixing lots of messages and getting infrequent replies (or none at all), it might mean that you werent sufficiently clear in the query you posted.

You might generally double your chances of acquiring a response if you