At a family party recently, an older relative asked me to send him a updated family group sheet of my family as he did not have the birth dates of my kids. I told him I would get it to him within the week. From the tone of the conversation I think he was expecting me to print the information, place it in a envelope and mail it to him. Being that he was "old school" he would have gladly received my letter, opened it and manually input the data into his computer. In this day and age that seemed crazy to me. So I wrote my own family group sheet email template and sent him all my family's information.
I plan on using this for people who are comfortable with email but not as comfortable with their computer to do any kind of data exports. This will get them the information more rapidly. This method could also be used to solicit information from busy people who won't sit down and fill out paper work and mail it back to you but would fill out blanks in a email and hit the reply button. This will make your life easier as you can just copy and paste the data into your computer.
There are other ways that you could get tech savvy such as shared Google doc but I find keeping it simple helps you to be able to do more genealogy and less technical support. You can also fill in any information that you already have and customize the information collected for older children (who live elsewhere and have occupations) or younger children (who presumably live at home).
There is a chance (even a good chance) that my relative will take my email, print it out and input the data manually into his computer. Rather than send a tutorial of how to copy and paste in Windows, I take assurance that he has the information that he requested.
Sample Family group email chart
Your Name:
Date of Birth:
Location:
Occupation:
Resides:
Married:
Location:
Spouse:
Spouse DOB:
Location:
Occupation:
Children:
Child 1 Name
C1 DOB:
Location:
Resides:
Child 2 Name
C2 DOB:
Location:
Resides:
