Tuesday’s Tip: Search Mailing Lists

Mailing lists can be a great tool for collaboration with other researchers in your area of interest. They can also be a great source information. But you don’t necessarily need to be on a list in order to benefit from it.

The RootsWeb mailing lists are archived—and searchable.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about a series of emails from several years ago which included marriage and death transcriptions from a Lancaster County newspaper as a possible source for information. But I haven’t been able to find them in my inbox. I’ve changed computers since then, and those old emails apparently didn’t make it to the new computer.

Luckily, I remember which mailing list they were from. A quick search and I was able to pull up a list. Here are links to the archived emails for information from the 1848 Lancaster Intelligencer:

This information was transcribed by Maria Campbell and sent to the PALANCAS-L mailing list in 2010. For more examples with different years and newspapers, check out the archives of the PALANCAS-L mailing list or search for your ancestor.