Making your message matter

[MaryA]

Use a meaningful heading - "Help wanted" just doesn't do it for me - but a family name, date, place etc. will.

Give the information that you have - a census reference again is pretty meaningless to somebody who doesn't have access to view it, but may have other resources to hand which they would be willing to use to help - so long as they knew what they were looking for. So quote the most recent census details that you have found, include the reference and don't forget BIRTHPLACES! They may be living in Liverpool but a birthplace, confirming this or somewhere else is extremely useful.

Give a brief summary of details that you already have and what you are looking to find - if you have all the census information you need it's just wasting time to duplicate efforts.

References
To me a list of the names, ages and occupations of people in a census is useful, but if I was given them and then sometime in the future I had a subscription to be able to download the actual image, or an opportunity to check it out at the Record Office, there are often times when I might find it difficult to find the correct entry, probably due to mis-spellings of the names etc.

Many of you will be starting to input your research into a new family history programme and I would think that you might like to start out as you mean to go on by entering the source details as well as the text.

Now if I was given the RG number, together with Folio and Page each time, good housekeeping in your family history programme would be to add this as part of the source ie. the census itself and in time to come it would be very easy to look it up using these details.

[Laurence Roberts]

This is helpful and I am trying to understand it all. Forgive me but I don t know what RG means.

much obliged

[MaryA]

The reference for every census consists of - example as follows:

Class: RG11 (11 = 1881); Piece: 3647; Folio: 84; Page: 24

Using this reference makes it easy to find the exact image that somebody else has mentioned.

This is a standard reference, given by the National Archives, so no matter which site you search for it - Ancestry, Findmypast, The Genealogist, Genesreunited, it is always the same.