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My top priority remains sorting out any logging-in & subscription problems experienced by actual & prospective Members. My next priority is dealing with emails from those people who have proven themselves to be worthy long-term correspondents. Only after them do I work on emails from other people, if I have time. It is the lack of time & energy, not an unwillingness to correspond, that has led to this approach. Please remember that I do NOT do private research for people or offer a consultancy service.

As indicated in ‘Priorities’, I do not always get around to dealing promptly with non-subscription correspondence from people I do not know. In fact, I have a huge backlog of correspondence to deal with (on my own, whilst trying to ‘have a life’ outside of Stirnet). However, I do give priority to those who persevere and come back to me a second time, politely reminding me of an earlier email that had gone unanswered, after giving me a month or so’s grace.

Not least to reduce the need for site visitors to send me emails, I have gone to a lot of effort to provide answers in the site to all of the questions I think people might have. Please do look at the Frequently Asked Questions and Support pages before you contact me for it really is likely that you will find an answer in the site. Of course, this does not apply to requests for Free Membership, which is covered in the next point.

If you are interested in obtaining Free Membership, please do read through the relevant part on the Membership page before you contact me. I am really pleased when people come forward with genuine offers and it is worth my while to offer them Free Membership. Sadly, over the years I have received too many requests from people who have not bothered to read the criteria I have set. Please remember that, whilst you may be interested only in one particular family, my interest is in developing the whole site and, as far as the Families Database is concerned, in expanding it to cover thousands of different families. There are still many families not yet covered at all by the database to whom I feel obliged to give some priority. However, if you spot an error in the database, please do let me know, providing explanation/support for the proposed correction. I know that even my most reputable sources contain mistakes. I want to identify them so as not to perpetuate them but I need help to do so. I like to be generous to those who do help me.

I must admit that I am quite partial to compliments. I do value constructive criticism but admit to being bored with those (fortunately rare nowadays) who carp at my not being able to help them when I have never said I could. As long as you are polite, feel free to offer constructive criticism but please don’t just repeat something I already know (such as a point noted on the Compliments & Criticisms page).

I tend to put to the side any email that is difficult for me to work on and, like many others, I tend to delete e-mails that look at all ‘spammish’ without opening them. If you have a question relating to a particular page or article in this site, please clearly identify that page or article, perhaps in your email’s subject line. Please do not just provide me with a wad of information that I have to plough through for it is likely that I will not have time to go through it all. Supporting information should be provided where possible but, if there is much of it, please tell me exactly what to look at and where to find it, preferably identifying the key points in the email and providing the supporting information as an attachment. If I can deal with something that has a quick non-trivial impact on the site then I will probably deal with it quite quickly. If I am asked to spend much time on something which may not help me much then I will probably put it to the side until I have run out of other things to do, something that may never happen.