As a minimum, I would like to see the person asking the question provide some sort of information about how they arrived at the 'facts' they are presenting to us. Is it a family story? Something written in a family Bible? Compiled from many records? Knowing where your information came from is an important part of doing family history research.
When you present information like this with no information about where you found it, it can be misleading:
Wife: Gustina Rosomfsha Marriage: About 1867 in Wayne, Michigan
If this is the only information we have, the potential answerer now has to guess where it came from. It's relatively easy to find the wife's name because the couple shows up as parents in the children's marriage and death records, but how do they know the parents married around 1867? Is the estimated year calculated from the 1900 Census? And how do they know the marriage took place in Wayne County Michigan? Is that a guess, because they lived in Wayne County and child #1 was born there? If so, why not say that?
Simply by adding the phrase
(1900 Census)
and some sort of location, after a line such as
Birth: June of 1825 Birth Place: Germany
then we can see at a glance where the information came from.
The information in this question was probably compiled from a group of records -- the 1900 Census (which has the widowed father only), and the children's vital records, that have been collected and presented as a seemingly coherent whole simply because the father's name matches. But the person asking the question has forced the potential answerers to figure that out, when the same time could have been used to start answering the question.
I don't expect new users to write full-blown source citations or to link in the sources themselves. I had never used Markdown before coming to G&FH.SE, and I can understand how new users might be uncomfortable with doing more than basic editing.
But if the question includes a brief list of sources already consulted, or the provenance of the information is contained in the body of the question, then it shows the state of the person's research at the time they wrote the question.
From there, it's easy for those of us already familiar with the editing to drop in links to the sources used when free-to-view copies are out there, or to pull in other information contained on those sources. But the information should be in the question itself -- an answerer shouldn't be directed away from G&FH.SE. If the link to the other website breaks, we're left with incomplete information.
Many of the professional genealogists say that brick walls are often self-created. We have all done this to ourselves -- and this is exactly how it happens -- by cobbling together a group of facts, stripped of all context -- guesses and un-examined data all thrown together to make a franken-person.
As a contrast, I offer one of the queries I posted on the website Curious Fox, from my early days as a genealogist. I began my research in 2006; the query was last revised in 2009, probably when I revised it to say the relationship question had been solved. Curious Fox posts queries by location, so it is understood that I meant Brixham in Devon; I specified which Slapton I meant because there are three different Slaptons. The title reflects the Curious Fox format which does not require questions in the title.
BATTEN and ELLIOTT families in 1881 Brixham
Looking for more information about Angelina Batten b 1851/2 who
appears in the 1881 Census at 18 Burton Street in Brixham with her
husband Thomas J. Batten b 1852/3 and their children, and visitors
Charles Elliott (b 1857/8 in Devonport), his wife Augusta b. 1857/8,
and their infant son Cecil. Both Angelina and Augusta were born in
Slapton (near Kingsbridge in Devon). There are entries in FreeBMD for
marriage registrations for couples whose marriages seem to be consistent
with these families, a Charles Edward G Elliott and Augusta Knowles
reg in Q2 1878, a Thomas Batten and Angelina Knowles reg in Q3 1874.
The Elliotts may be the family I am researching who appear in the 1910
US census residing in Holyoke (Hampden County) Massachusetts. I am
trying to find other evidence for the residence of the Elliotts in
1881, to confirm the relationship between Angelina and Augusta, and
find their siblings and parents and other relatives. Does anyone
recognize these families?
There are plenty of things wrong with this, and it also needs to be improved.
The query doesn't meet G&FH.SE standards because I have several different questions in it, and I didn't give any archive references for the 1881 Census. I didn't give complete GRO registrations for the two marriage registrations.
BUT - at least I had three specific questions in the query instead of simply saying "I want anything about this person" and stopping at that.
Anyone reading this can see that I had started with the 1881 Census, had searched FreeBMD for marriage registrations, but hadn't ordered the certificates yet, and that I suspected that the two women were related somehow because they had the same maiden name.
This had enough workable information in it that another user on the site (completely unrelated to either family) did census lookups for me, worked the relationship problem, and suggested that Angelina and Augusta are aunt and niece. This was a great kindness, because I didn't have access to census records from the UK at that time, except for the 1881 Census which was free on FamilySearch.
(Obviously since then I've researched more and know a great deal about the rest of the family, but I still haven't figured out residence information for the Elliotts in 1881.)
My general experience is that if I post a query on Curious Fox which is rich in information, I'm far more likely to get an answer than one which is shorter and has less detail -- which is why I would like to see people put more detail in their questions here.
Make it easy for someone to say, "Oh, I can help with that!"
I have moved my remarks on the edited question title below this line. One of the difficulties we have with trying to improve low-content questions is that we risk introducing more assumptions into the question. I originally wrote:
I also have a problem with the edit on the title, since the question
now reads "finding parents in Germany" where the original did not.
I have cases in my own research where I had families in the 1900
Census, for whom I did not know the parents. Subsequent research
showed that the father also came to the US as well. Just because a
person in the 1900 Census was born in Germany in 1825 doesn't mean
that his parents automatically stayed behind in Germany. His parents
could have come over in 1866 as well.
