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Wednesday, September 08, 2010

A "SOCIAL" EXPERIMENT

I've written several blogposts over the years about my maternal
grandfather Edward F. White Sr and how little I know about that
side of the family due to the divorce between him and my grandmother
Agnes McFarland. I'd hoped that eventually some unknown White
family cousin would find my posts, contact me, and fill in some
blanks in the family history, but so far there hasn't been even a peep.
So now I'm going to try a little experiment. The genealogy community
is making wider and wider use of online social networks, and taking a
cue from that, I'm going to use Facebook.

I decided to start a "White Family" group and thought about how
I could name it so those possible cousins might find it. Alas, White
is one of the most common surnames in the world. So I pushed it
back one generation to Edward's parents and named the group
"Descendants of Edward White and Pauline Offinger". Who knows?
Maybe an Offinger cousin will find it too!

For a description I wrote the following:

"Devoted to the family of Edward White and Pauline Offinger of
Boston, Ma."

Then I posted this to the Wall:

"I'm creating this group in hopes of finding other descendants of 
Edward and Pauline. Due to the divorce of my grandparents 
Edward F White Sr and Agnes McFarland, I know very little 
about the family and I hope to establish contacts to any cousins 
who might be out there."

Finally I posted a "White Family" topic to the Forum and gave the
names and dates for Edward, Pauline, and their children. I plan to
add the blogposts I've already written to it as well.

So, we'll see if I have any better luck on Facebook than I've had
here. If I do, I'll be blogging about it here!

6 comments:

Harriet said...

Good Luck! I hope someday to find more about the Newby family, I've blogged and posted pictures on facebook but nothing. I'll try to watch what you do maybe I'll give that a try.

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

Good luck!

Greta Koehl said...

I'll be interested to see the results ... and I might try the idea myself!

Diana Ritchie said...

Ditto what Greta said! I can't wait to hear what comes of this...I have some Evans relatives that I'd love to find!

Michelle Goodrum said...

Ditto for me to. I'm curious to see if your little experiment works. I hope it does!

Ken Spangler said...

What an awesome idea Bill! I might give something like this a try for my Stevenson relatives. Perhaps we could be like a couple of guinea pigs! Sometimes two test subjects is better than one!