ROOTS & BRANCHES

The conversation began about a month ago when Laura Wolf emailed me with some welcome words of praise for my book The Family Tree Historical Newspapers Guide.“I learned a lot from your book and wanted to take a moment to thank you,” Wolf wrote. “The book was packed with information, but yet very accessible and even fun to read.”I say these words of praise are welcome since while I’m more known as a German genealogy specialist, my newspapers book remains my favorite since it filled a large gap in the canon of family history books and harkened back to my first career as a newspaper copy editor.Alas, the fact of it being my favorite meant little to the broader audience of genealogists as it has been my lowest-selling commercially published book and the only one currently not in print (the ebook is still available from the publisher and of course used copies are floating around the secondary book market).But back to the conversation with Wolf. Now that she’s aware of “Roots & Branches,” she’s started reading past installments (found on my blog website, www.roots-branches.com) from the most recent and got as far as May of this year.“I read your column about genealogists helping others with families who aren’t their own. You mentioned that sometimes what you can do is point people to the right people. I enjoyed reading that because I have background in sociology and that rang a bell for me,” she wrote.Wolf continued, “In social networks, the most powerful connections we have are not, as many would assume, our “strong ties” (our connections with close family, friends, coworkers, etc.), but our “weak ties” — simply put, those who someone we know knows. Those are the ties that often change lives.”She gave a theoretical example: “You are looking for a job in non-profit HR? My sister’s husband is trying to hire someone for his autism advocacy organization.”   “Even though I have only been working on my own family history research for about a year, I have already found this phenomenon to be at play in this world,” Wolf wrote. “As a long-time qualitative researcher who has done thousands of interviews with others about many topics, my advice to others would be not to just to ask people what experience they have with X topic or Y family, but to always add, ‘Who else do you suggest I talk with about this?’ ”I realized that I have done this plenty of times without thinking about it … but not in an intentional way, which makes me wonder how many times I may have missed an opportunity to take research further by asking the “who else” question. Maybe I’ve found an early New Year’s resolution.