Connections

I started a genealogical project on Geni.com back in February, 2007, working from memory. My paternal grandfather’s brother Noah had a considerably larger branch, which was filled out beautifully with research by the Snyder family. I filled another major branch based on data from an exhaustive genealogy work published in the early 1950s. At this point, the extended family tree includes 962 blood relatives.

I got an email this week from a long-lost cousin who discovered he was named in the tree as a result of a Google search for his name.

I recall him only dimly, since he’s 10 years younger than I. I still have a mental image of his older sister, since she was closer to my age when I saw her last back in the late 1950s or early ‘60s.

His maternal grandmother and my father were siblings, which makes him a first cousin, once-removed. We had an email exchange last night and I was able to fill in some blanks for him about family members – a cousin who was a Japanese prisoner of war in the Philippines and an mentally disturbed aunt who spent much of her adult life in a state hospital in Indiana.

It just goes to show, you never know who is going to pop up through an Internet connection.