Thursday, June 21, 2012

Subscribe to or Read the Transitional Genealogists Forum on Rootsweb

Are you trying to improve your genealogy knowledge and research skills?  Are you thinking about being a professional genealogist?

One of the very best, and most interesting, message boards is the Transitional Genealogists Forum  (TGF).
Many professional genealogists, and many "transitionals" who want to improve their knowledge and skills, subscribe to this message board and participate in it.  When you subscribe (here), you can receive messages to the TGF by email, and send messages by email.  

There are archives for all Rootsweb Message Boards, and the TGF message board archives are here.  The landing page is:


The archives are arranged by month.  I have set the list above to display in "reverse" order so that the latest months are at the top of the list.

I picked the month of June 2012, for which there are already 335 messages (about 16 per day):


I chose to display the messages in "threaded" order, with names and dates displayed.  The default is now "reverse chronological" order which is pretty stupid, in my humble opinion.  It is much easier to find messages for a specific thread or from a specific person using threaded messages with names and dates.

Scrolling down a bit, I picked a message about "PA Death Certificates" to read (two screens):



As you can see, the responses to the original message are listed at the bottom in threaded form, and are clickable.

This message board is very active, and has many helpful and interesting message threads.  There have been a robust discussions about:

*  Finding marriage licenses in unexpected places :)

*  Dispelling family myths

*  Citing images at FamilySearch

*  Bad information in trees on Ancestry

Do you want to search this particular message board?  You can do so at http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/search?aop&path=TRANSITIONAL-GENEALOGISTS-FORUM.



I can hear some of my readers saying:  "Oh yeah, that's just what I need - more email and more genealogy things to read!"  Yep - but it's good stuff!  I subscribe and enjoy the conversations.  The conversations are almost always supportive and civil.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/06/subscribe-or-read-transitional.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

2 comments:

Root Digger said...

Thank you Randy for always educating..I will be checking in and signing up for this site.

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

I've been a lurker on this list for a couple of years, commenting rarely, but the best part of the list is the many professional genealogists who support the transitional genealogists on the list!