Genealogy question

[bright.ton42]

Just for the heck of it I googled my deceased dad's name, and it brought up Ancestry.com where to my amazement

someone had posted that they were looking for his family  -   they had details of his wife and kids (us), where we used to

live, dates,  and were spot on , the poster said she was a niece of my mother.   I had no idea I had a cousin with her

name, say XX,  and I messaged back that I am one of the kids, and would love more info.

XX lives in the UK where my mum's family came from,  and the post was 12 months ago, and I haven't heard back

yet.   She has a user name which I clicked on for other posts and they're all related to this question where others had replied and given her a fair bit of info about me. 

Is there any way I can find out more about her without registering or setting up a family tree which I'm not ready to do?  Would

Ancestry.com have an email address for her?  My mother had a very common Irish surname so searching isn't bringing up anything and this person hasn't given a surname.   .

[***super_nova***]

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@roserobin12 wrote:

Supa Nova, from experience I think Ancestry is useless for European genealogy. My last sub was a worldwide sub and it was near to useless for my own family who come from Europe. The UK one is great for my hubbys family. I think if a person is starting out and if you are on Facebook to join a group there and see what help you can get from them.

Minimum ancestry sub is a month.

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Thanks, well that confirmed what I found with my 2 weeks free access.  Except that in that time I had no idea about anything about my father's side of the family.   Since then I have done thorough search and know awful lot.  And if any of the distant relatives went to the USA or UK, then I would be able to find out.

I agree that just whole lots of names and dates look meaningless, but if you carefully search through the marriages, birth and death in digitised archives, you can discover all sorts of stuff.  For instance my grandmother's family was living in the same place as far as the records go.  In the Archive there was also a Chronicle of that area written in 1933; it included some history of the area with the local council notes of various celebrations, or unveiling monument to dead from WW1 and stating who was present and how much did various citizens contribute.  Also part of the chronicle was a story written by my grandmother's cousin about his experience in WW1.  That was very interesting for me to hear about WW1 from the point of people fighting on the other side.  They did not volunteer, actually they really did not want to be there.  This guy actually deserted, and as a POW was walked from Yugoslavia to Italy, in the winter and barefooted, and on his way learning to speak Italian and French as he thought he may need it to join the foreign legion to fight against the Kaiser, which he did and as he as able to communicate with the French and Italians he became an officer.  And through all the horror of war, and incredible suffering around him, he talked with great compassion about animals caught in it all, be it horses, dog or a wild rabbit that he encountered on an island in fast flowing river, with artillery shells exploding all over the place.  I wish I knew him, but he died when I was only couple of years old.

But just reading through the records at what age people died and the cause, to see sometimes pages and pages of very small children dying of preventable diseases, or old people dying from malnutrition, and of-course there is usually occupation stated, you get some idea of their lives. 

Seeing that women in my grandmother's background had usually about 10children, and from what I can see most survived to adulthood (I found marriage records), I must have thousands of distant relatives.  I did leave messages on some family tree discussion boards but so far did not get very far that way.