Lisa Louise Cooke
Episode 14: Genealogical Cold Calling
It can be a big boost to your research to connect with someone who may have additional information and even photographs of your ancestors. But we shouldn’t just post our own family trees online and then sit back hoping that someone contacts us. We need to also be going out there on the Internet and looking for trees that others have posted and initiating contact with them!
So in today’s episode we’re going to talk about how to go about contacting other researchers as well as relatives that we find. I call this “genealogical cold calling” – and I’m going to call on a relative of mine who is an expert in contacting and interviewing folks for the first time.
My cousin Carolyn Ender has conducted hundreds of telephone interviews and has a knack for quickly connecting with folks she doesn’t know over the telephone in ways that puts them at ease and brings to light the information that she’s looking for.
But first, we do some follow up with an email from a listener about family trees. Then, I share a little story that puts into practice what we’ve learned so far in this podcast series.
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Transcript
SHOW NOTES
This week’s email comes from John in Maryland, a proud descendant of Italian ancestors who wrote in with an important question on the topic of online family trees which we covered in Episodes 12 & 13 of the podcast.
John writes:
One question I have about online family trees (Episode 12) is concerning security. I'm concerned that by posting mother's maiden names of living people may provide information for identity theft. Many banks require your mother's maiden name for a security question. I see that most information of living people can be restricted to not be shown on some places that you can post your family tree, however, the names are typically still listed. I use the My Heritage website to post my family tree. I can still see the names of the living relatives. I see that you can restrict access to the online family tree to only be available to site member. Unfortunately this setting would not allow us to potentially find distant relatives who may be looking for common family trees online."
For many years banks and other institutions have been using Mother’s Maiden name as a security question, assuming that only you would know your mother’s maiden name. But of course that has changed dramatically! Anyone with a little tenacity could probably rather quickly put their hands on that information by going online.
I contacted Gilad Japhet the Founder of MyHeritage to get the inside scoop on the website’s privacy tools. Here’s what Gilad had to say…
“When a user posts such information, he or she can see the details of the living people, but other people cannot. Strangers only see information on deceased people. We call this “Automatic Data Privatization.” That is why MyHeritage is home to more than 305 million names posted by our 28.8 million users. After Ancestry.com, MyHeritage is now the world's second largest genealogy community site and is one of the fastest growing, thanks to its availability in 34 languages.
MyHeritage also has unique technology called Smart Matching that compares the trees of its users to find overlaps. When trees match, the tree’s owners are notified and each can see the corresponding portion from the other tree, but not additional information about living relatives. This useful tool helps genealogists find other people who are related to them, so that they may exchange information, and the rest is up to them. It's also a great method to learn more from other people, for example, get missing dates that other people know, of people in your tree, and generally grow the tree further.
The beauty of Smart Matches is that users can have a fine control over it. They can make their sites completely private (so that guests would not even be able to see details of deceased people) and separately decide if they want Smart Matching to be enabled or not.”
As you may know if you’re signed up for the free Genealogy Gems email Newsletter I recently spent 12 nights this month on a Caribbean cruise where I had the opportunity to teach a series of genealogy classes.
Lots of the folks who attended the classes were just getting started in their research, and a gentleman, also named John, was one of those. He had wondered for many years what had become of an ancestor of his who was born in NY and who he was pretty sure had died in California. He had checked the 1930 census for him in California but he wasn’t there. Being new to genealogy he was a little timid and unsure about where to dive in, so I offered to do a quick search when I got home and see if I could get the ball rolling.
I thought it would be interesting to see just how much I could find in 1 hour or less online using the strategies we’ve covered here on the podcast so far.
Well, in that one hour time frame, I was not only able to find his death information, but I also found him in the 1930 and 1920 census, and located his ancestor’s father and grandfather. Now this isn’t because I’m some sort of genealogy genius. Far from it! I simply put into practice all the things we’ve covered so far in this podcast and followed good basic genealogical research principles:
- Work backwards
- Locate the death record
- Search the census starting with the most recent enumeration
- Locate the birth record
- And finally search for other online family trees that include the same family line
Believe me, this isn’t just text box stuff we’re covering on the podcast. We’re talking about tried and true principles that work and can bring exciting results in one hour or less.
INTERVIEW WITH CAROLYN ENDER: "Genealogical Cold Calling"
In episodes 12 & 13 we talked at length about online family trees. I hope you’ve taken a serious look at some of the great tools that we talked about and perhaps even done some searches to see if anyone else out there is researching one of your family lines.
But the question we haven’t answered yet is, “what in the world are you supposed to do once you’ve identified someone who is, let’s face it, a complete stranger to you?" Calling up people we don’t know and asking them a bunch of questions isn’t something we do every day. Makes us sound more like a telephone solicitor than a family historian!
As intimidating, and let’s be honest, downright scary as it might seem to pick up the phone and call a stranger to ask them about family history, it may be the difference between whether or not you find that next elusive ancestor, or learn about some heroic feat of an relative that you never knew about.
Carolyn Ender lives across the country from me, and to this day we’ve never met in person. But because she picked up the phone and made that call, we’ve enjoyed some great shared research success as well as a wonderful friendship. Carolyn has taken cold calling to a high level, and has made hundreds of cold calls in pursuit of her family tree. I have learned a lot from her over the years, and want you to benefit from her experience as well.
Carolyn’s Steps to Genealogical Cold Calling Success:
- Identify the person you want to call
- Locate the person's phone number
- Plan before you dial
- Work up the “nerve” to make the call
- Introduce Yourself
- Start at the beginning - a family name they might recognize, and how you think they might be connected
In our next episode, I’ll be talking to Carolyn about what we, as the interviewer should be doing during the call, what to do if No Answers, her “Must Ask” Questions, and how to wrap up the call. But making research calls doesn’t stop when you hang up. Carolyn has some great strategies for documenting the call and the necessary database entry that needs to happen, as well as creative Follow-up Suggestions.
At the end of next week’s episode you will be fully equipped to place calls to anyone, known to you or not, that may be able to help you make progress with your research
