One of the benefits of posting your genealogy information online is that you get lots of neat mail. Someone wrote to me today to say her ancestors worked with my grandparents back in 1920 at the Mount Holly Inn in Baltimore, Maryland. (Of course the place burned to the ground in a huge fire in December 1920, but don't be blaming my grandfather, alright? I'm sure he had a decent alibi.) She thanked me for pointing out some sources where she might get a photo of the hotel.
I get mail daily from genealogists around the world seeking more details or asking for help regarding family members they've found in my surname database. A guy in New Zealand wrote me last year because he was writing a book about steamship stewardesses in the South Pacific and was interested in the correspondence my grandfather received from a young lady back in the 1910-1917 period.
Grandpa had a bunch of girlfriends and they all wrote him often. He stashed those love letters away and my aunt somehow got ahold of them and squirreled them away. It wasn't until she died that her sister found the letters and shared them with the rest of us. I hope you find a wonderful little stash of old letters like these and take the time to read and transcribe them. (You'll find links to my grandfather's history and correspondence on my genealogy home page to the right on this page.)
Online genealogy research is a combination of finding sources and putting your data out there for people to find. I encourage you to write a brief history of the family and upload it. Make a simple family tree using Family Treemaker software and upload the data for free to Rootsweb WorldConnect. It will get sucked into the Ancestry pay service database and you'll have both free users of Rootsweb and paid subscribers of Ancestry picking through your ancestors day and night. They'll write to you, so be nice to them and have fun.
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