CuriousFox village entry: free "who remembers" query for Llandough / Penarth

Date: 2026-10-29 · Status: GATE. It's outward (a public post under an account), so it waits for the project lead's GO. Free tier only; zero spend.

What it is

CuriousFox (curiousfox.com) is the UK and Ireland village-by-village contact site for family and local history. It's a small husband-and-wife business run from North Cornwall. There's no advertising and no affiliate links, and the whole site is geocoded. Every place has a page of entries. These are short queries ("looking for anyone with information on …"). Members reply privately through the site's messaging, and email addresses are never shown.

Facts read 29 Oct 2026 (help page, terms, live pages)

• Free vs paid: anyone can join free and post entries.
• In any message exchange, at least one side must be a paid member. Paid members' entries show a green envelope and anyone can message them. Free members' entries show a red envelope and only paid members can message them.
• Paid membership costs £6.00 a year. It adds a profile, the ability to edit entries, a link to a personal family-history website ("restrictions apply"), and an email when new entries are added to a saved village.
• In the help page's own words: "You are far more likely to get a response if you are a paid member with a green envelope".
• The site is active: the front page showed new entries dated Thu 29 Oct 2026, several already marked "Replies from 1 Person".
• Local pages:
• Penarth (vid=45013) has 14 entries: the Thorne, Brotherton/Hooper, Botting, Angove/Hawkins, Robins and other families, mostly Victorian Penarth.
• Lower Penarth (vid=38550) also exists.
• No Llandough, Llandochau or Leckwith page shows in the Glamorgan village list. The help page states that if a place is missing, members can email and the site will locate it or add it.
• Terms that matter:
• §8: no messages "offering or publicising commercial services, or that are effectively adverts for one particular website … items for sale". The site encourages "provision of information including a reference to its source but not promotions for a specific website".
• §12: it isn't a forum. Don't answer another entry with an entry.
• Message volume is capped per member.
• No email address in a first message.
• §20: copyright in anything posted passes to curiousfox.com. So post a short query only, never e-book text, transcriptions or research write-ups.
• What practitioners report (genealogy-specialists.com thread, 2013–2020):
• "I made a contact through Curious Fox which helped me solve a long-standing brickwall".
• "a cousin of mine replied to me … Both of us chasing the same information".
• "I managed to find a whole heap of Sussex ancestors thanks to one post".
• One user got a reply years after posting and had to pay to read it. It came from a relative and "unlocked more information".
• Pattern: low volume, long tail, high-value contacts. Entries stay up as a long-term archive.

How to do it (when GO'd)

1. Account: a free member account on [address kept in the project workspace] Display name "Cedwyn research", never the project lead. - Paid (£6) would make replies possible from free members too. That's a spend, so the project lead's GO. - Without paid, only paid members can reply. That's a smaller but more committed pool.
2. Place: ask CuriousFox by email to add "Llandough (near Penarth), Glamorgan" first. Sending that is also outward, so it's in the same GO. Fallback: post under Penarth, titled with "Llandough near Penarth".
3. One entry, about 80 words, research-first, no link, nothing for sale:

   Title: Williams family, Great House Farm, Llandough (near Penarth) Looking for anyone with family links to the Williams household at Great House Farm, Llandough-juxta-Penarth. John Williams farmed about 110 acres there in 1871 (census RG10/5368), with wife Mary and children Janet, Ellen and John. Also interested in photographs of the farmhouse or farm before 1960, and memories of the farm in the 1930s–50s.

4. Optional second entry (after 8 weeks, only if the first gets a reply): Rees family, Llandough Farm. It's a neighbouring household and builds the one-place picture.
5. Replies: move the conversation to the Cedwyn contact form or email only after the other person replies (site rule). Log each contact as a HubSpot note. Ask consent before anything they share is used publicly (reader-memories-call-ugc-consent-local-history.md).
6. Check: once a week, as part of the inbox routine. Messages arrive by email from [address kept in the project workspace], so allowlist it.

How we apply it to Cedwyn

• Purpose: sourcing, not selling. Find descendants and photos for the Great House Farm record. Any sales effect is indirect: a contact who later reads the e-books.
• Fit with tonight's work: the 1871 entry, the younger John born about 1867/68, and the open question of Amy after 1853. Those are exactly the questions a descendant could answer.
• Rules:
• Never name the project lead.
• Banned words list applies.
• No accusations, no case talk, no BP v Buckler in the entry.
• Nothing about family holdings.
• Living people are never named.
• No outbound or shop link in entries (terms §8 and our own rule).
• Measure: replies per entry, contacts that yield a record or photo, time to first reply. Kill rule: 0 replies in 12 months means delete the entry (entries persist, so leave it up longer than usual before giving up).
• Not checked: the exact link "restrictions" for paid profiles (terms §14 only covers paid aggregators). Whether CuriousFox will add Llandough as a separate place.

Sources

• curiousfox.com ; /uk/help/help.php ; /uk/pages/terms.php ; /uk/counties/Glamorgan.php ; /uk/r.php?vid=45013 ; /uk/r.php?vid=38550 (read 29 Oct 2026)
• sassyjanegenealogy.com (2015 overview; price then £5.50)
• genealogy-specialists.com (user testimony 2013–2020)

Raw Markdown: curiousfox-village-entry-who-remembers-query.md · version and changes: changelog · machine index: agents.json