General Chat

I've been a member here for about five years and in the main have had prompt and helpful replies to enquiries I made to other members and now have dozens of contacts helping me in my search. What I don't understand is why some people just don't reply at all. I can think of at least 5 people who have ignored enquiries from me (2 of them in the past few weeks). Now the common theme was that the persons mentioned were possibly still living so there could be some privacy issue or interpersonal feud behind ignoring my contacts. Have you been ignored by other members when you contacted them, and if you were tempted to ignore another member, what would be your reasons ?

Have come to the conclusion they must be lapsed members Frank. No way of telling on this site.

I never thought of that Chris. I assumed that lapsed members would have their trees removed and any hot matches would no longer be available, hence searches would not find matches.

The way I understand it, is that in the section "My Account" you can delete your tree but if you just cease to be a member of GR your tree stays unless you delete it.

As Chris says, they may be lapsed members or have no interest in doing any more to their tree and just delete your message. If they are no longer members of GR, then GR would no longer have their email address, so if you don't get a message from GR, you can take it that they are just not interested. Rude, I know - but some people are like that.

How do you word your messages? Some people don't like the simple "May I see your Tree please" and would like to know WHY you want to see it..

they could be lapsed members,
they could be ill,
they may no longer have internet access
they may only do it every now n again at the library,
so dont get on much to reply
they may also be dead, so unable to reply

there is lots of reasons somone may not reply, thro no fault of there own x

This topic comes up at least once a month.

There is technically, no concept of a Lapsed Member on GR. However, as SK has said, there could be a number of reasons why they no longer access the site.

Have you checked if they have read your message? If they have then it might be worth sending a follow up, if not then I'm afraid there is not a lot you can do.

On checking my Sent Messages I have 15 unread going back to the beginning of September, and a further 26 unread going back to the start of 2010, so you are not alone.

Quote>How do you word your messages? Some people don't like the simple "May I see your Tree please" and would like to know WHY you want to see itHave you checked if they have read your message? How do you word your messages? Some people don't like the simple "May I see your Tree please" and would like to know WHY you want to see it..<unquote

Always detailed in what I know, andin reasons for suspecting we may be connected. I never ask to see anyones tree until they have replied and confirmes we may be related and therefore have reasonable grounds to see it.

Have a look in your 'sent messages' folder. It the envelope symbol against their name is purple, it hasn't been opened. It would be white if they had

That's amazing . Is that GRs best kept secret ? Thanks for the tip.

By the way I had a problem with my previous post in which I asked how you know if a message had been read. Trying to combine that with another quote about how I ask people, that part of my message appeared but the other half did not. I edited it to try and make both points appear, but then the original question disppeared. Strange problem, caused by using multiple quotes I suppose.

No, don't use multiple quotes, or oddball punctuation or other non-printable characters either. Web sites displays can interpret them as control characters and cause odd things to happen. A few years back they were banned completely from board names because of the problems they caused.

Secret? do you mean the purple envelope? Not really, that has been there for several years now.

Yes but they didn't tell me its significance. I never noticed.