Yes, I now know, after being directed to the small print under his name. The time frame is not of great importance, although people who post up to 10 years or more away often change their email. I had one such contact many years ago who helped me enormously by giving me so much information on the Lyons family from Roscommon whom she had paid some organisation a great sum of money to research for her only to receive all this info that was not her line of the family at all. Which makes me weary of paying for research and not knowing if the researcher is on the right track at all. Anyway she had discovered from my posts that all the information she had was in fact my grandmother and her ancestors and she was very happy to pass it all onto me for free, much to my delight, as it saved me many years of searching. She was tracing a grand-aunt that had the same name as my grandmother and sadly I was not able to form any sort of link. She had only one query about one person listed on the research who was a live-in housekeeper in my grandfather's household and it related to her son and him sailing to the US. A few years later I managed to find out the answer to her query and tried to contact her but all her emails were returned. Such a shame. Whether she changed her email or, like your friend Christopher, had died, I will never know, but I dearly wanted to get in touch with her again to return the favour in some way. Such is life. However we all face a challenge in our research. We all hit a brick wall somewhere along the line. But we strive to keep going and hopefully this thread and others might help me along the way.