Wisdom Wednesday: And sometimes you get worse than nothing

I like making contact with distant cousins through Ancestry.com, or at least other people looking to connect about shared relatives. There's probably not a week that goes by when I don't get one of these Ancestry.com messages. Sometimes it's a correction or update. Sometimes it's just reaching out with a "Hey, cousin!" message. Either way, it's all fun.

A couple of weeks ago I got a message with a correction and elaboration, asking how I was related to one particular individual on the Big Tree. Well, I had to stop and think but I was able to trace the lines back and over a bump or two and make the connection. Then we emailed back and forth a bit. She (the person on the other end of the emails) sent really long and friendly messages with a lot of personal details about her life. Lots of troubles, lots of grief... you know, the usual life lived hard. I sent back some encouraging words.

At some point she started telling me how she loved the detective work of genealogy and gave a couple of very long and elaborate examples of her sleuthing. She also wrote that she was thinking about going pro and charging for her services and had done so for some people. I sent back some encouraging words.

Now, I do like to write here on the blog, but after I do that and then some writing for Mom and her stories, I'm pretty much done, so I wasn't keeping up my end of the conversation with this new pen-pal, and I felt kinda' bad. So I told her as much... and she wrote back that I was not to worry because she could tell I was "so much fun." OK, I'm fun now and again. But not at the moment because it's allergy season and my head is stuffed up. But it was nice of her to say so.

At one point when she was saying how much she loved to help people with their genealogy problems and loved a good mystery I thought to ask her if she had any observations off the top of her head about that Mystery Photo of ours depicting the entire family of my GGF, Daniel Williams. Here's a link to a previous post about that. This link, which I gave to my new friend, explains about the photo and my research plan that yielded nothing. So I thought if this gal was loving the sleuthing maybe she might have an observation from a different perspective. So I asked her, if she wanted and had a spare moment, to read the post and please point out the errors of my ways:)

Off she went like a bull out of the shoot, covering ground we'd all covered long ago, well and good! I tried to slow her down but she was on it. Finally the other shoe fell: she sent me her rates!!!

Yikes! I told her to STOP NOW. That was not what I had asked for. I did not want to hire a professional. Mom and I like doing it ourselves. It's our tree done our way. I just wanted a fresh eye on a big problem. Mom and I would do the real work.

Is this a new marketing and sales strategy I don't know about? Are there people out there trolling Ancestry.com trees looking for clients?

Anyone know anything about this approach?

Lois Williams Hedrick on left and Virginia Williams Kelly on right.

Ca. 1930s.

Many thanks to GeneaBlogger's for their blogging prompt called Wisdom Wednesdays.


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