L. David
Roper (roperld@vt.edu)
1001 Auburn
Drive
Blacksburg, Virginia 24060-8123
www.roperld.com
I have been able to help many people discover their ancestors and long-lost relatives because they sent to me data for their families. Thus I am able to help a given person and accumulate data that then, in the future, helps me to help other persons. Sometimes I am not able to provide a connection immediately to a family in my data bases, but I may be able to in the future as more data become available. Often one new small piece of data enables a connection to be made. I collect all data for my connected families as a service of devotion.
The best way to send genealogy data to me is by means of a GEDCOM file attached to an e-mail message. (You can include it in the message, but it saves me some work by attaching it to the message.) If you have a choice, use the 5.5 version of gedcom. Every good genealogy program has a feature for creating a gedcom file. Usually you will want to create it for all of the descendants of a person, so you will need to set that up before or while creating the file.
If you have trouble creating a gedcom file, I can use a plain text file (but I have to work hard at entering the data into my genealogy program, Personal Ancestry File or PAF). Of course, you can save me work by sending me a PAF file; you can get PAF free. I can also use files from Family Tree Maker and PDF files (created by Adobe Acrobat).
When you send data for a family, the dates and places of births, marriages and deaths are crucial for making connections. If you do not want dates or places for living persons to be in my data base or on my web site, do not include them in the data you send to me. Also, information about the parents of spouses is very helpful.
By helping me accumulate data for the Roper, Franklin and related families, we can gradually connect many previously unconnected families together. Such has already occurred many times.
Send files over 1 Mbytes in size to roperld@roperld.com; my usual address will reject such large files. Of course, it is best to ZIP such files first to reduce the size. If a file ZIPs down to less than 1 Mbytes, then you can send it to my usual address roperld@vt.edu.