Genealogists – you’ve got a friend in Facebook.

Yes, that mega-popular but often-maligned communications medium, believe it or not, might just prove very useful in your research. Properly used, Facebook can be a forum for mutually profitable discussions as historical and genealogical questions are asked and answered.

This goes not only for local folks, but also for people with local ties now living out of the area.

I’m talking mainly about the pages devoted to the history of various areas and aspects of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Here’s how things work. A member posts information on a town, a school, a business, a building, an event or an historical personage, and that information might well be useful to others. Or, a member asks a question, and others try to help with answers. In other words, the pages are interactive.

One of my favorites is “History of Wyoming Valley’s West Side,” administered by Mark Price. It’s well worth joining if you’ve had ancestors in the various West Side towns and the original townships from which they developed.

You’ll find pages of local history and reams of names from the past. Recently, for instance, a poster asked for information on the Gallup Cemetery, a burial ground that’s unknown today. Another poster replied with a reprinted news story from 1938 telling of how the long-forgotten burial ground was discovered by WPA workers in 1938 excavating for the Toby Creek flood control project.

Just about everything you could need to know about that historic old site was in the article – its location, its interments and its ultimate fate as the West Side grew.

Having read that kind of background, you’re ready to hit the digitized collections of historic local newspapers, picking up obituaries, church references and…