A few days ago I received this message on a family history research site:
Hi,
Do you know who the parents of Edith were?
Kind regards,
Pat
This is fairly typical of the standard of email I receive. I should mention that the subject of the email gave a surname too, but that is all. No date of birth or anything. How am I supposed to know who this is about if there are multiple Edith's with that surname?! So, fed up with these stupid emails, I replied with the following:
Hi,
To answer your question, yes.
Can I assume that you would like to know who they are? If so, then would you kindly like to supply me with sufficient information to allow me to actually figure out who you are talking about?
For example, John Smith (b1833, Henley, Oxfordshire) will allow me to pinpoint exactly who you are on about and will enable me to rule out multiple John Smith''s.
It would be a nice courtesy if you were to suggest names for, in this example, John''s parents. For instance, "Do you have John''s father as Edward (b1800, Droitwich, Worcestershire) ?" would be an excellent question when used in conjunction with the first example I have given.
Regards,
Lee
Then today I received this email:
What an arrogant individual you are!
I have been doing family research for around 10 years helping many people along the way and I have never seen such a rude reply in my life.
I am not going to respond to this directly. I have made my point but unfortunately it appears to have gone right over the head of this person. I was expecting a reply along the lines of a justification. Instead I got a completely unfounded attack on my character. It was a rude message from me but that is not the same as me being a rude or arrogant person. But, to be fair, I did assume that this Pat wrote all their emails in this way - which may well not be the case.
Even so, I do not think it that unreasonable a request. I could have used far less sarcasm, but I had had enough. So, Pat, it's nothing personal. If it hadn't have been you, it would've been someone else.
1 comment:
I get that too, it winds me up too. The last one was this week and I had no idea who they were on about and they were too vague and I havent done research for a while and due to recent circumstances I just made it so that she could see my tree as a whole, I tried to reply to that extent but the stupid website crashed (but no others so it wasn't my fault) so I gave up and she'll have to work it out herself.
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