Relative Something

I recently pulled a box from storage that holds much of my collection of family history, to revisit the documents related to Intervale Ranch. The box also holds a lot of stuff related to my sporadic forays into the genealogy of my family. That reignited my urge to again look into some of the dead-ends on my family tree. With no memory of where I left off the last time I was working on this project, I just tried starting fresh and simple. I did a Google search on a name. Sometimes, simple is good.

The second link on the list of results turned out to be a post on a message board requesting information about my great-grandparents. Wa-laa! The query that I discovered had been posted originally in 2005, so I suspected my results would be limited. However, in composing her query, the person provided so much detail that I had more answers than I could imagine. I didn’t really need to pursue her any further. However, I did have the information that she was seeking, so it was the least I could do to respond, even if it was four and a half years after the fact.

To my surprise, I got a reply within the hour. Today, I met one of our 4th cousins, once removed, online, and learned that one of our ancestors was a sharp-shooter in the civil war. I haven’t verified anything she told me, but it is fun to add these threads to our story. She mentioned, “…Hannah descends from the founder of Hampton, Rev. Stephen Bachiler quite famous and he has many famous descendants from actor James Dean to Pres. Richard Nixon and us.” My newly discovered distant cousin reported that she is in touch with other descendants, but I am the first one to contact her from this branch of the family.

It gives me the feeling that if we looked thoroughly enough, we would come to find many of us are more connected than we ever imagined. It’s the kind of thing that can lead from one thing to the next… from farm to family ancestors.

A work in progress