Day Twenty-Five: More Friends

I hit the jackpot with today's Fall Cleanup folder. Remember how I kept waiting to run across the file for those letters exchanged with that first Flowers family researcher I met online? Well, when I was first setting up this file system for my genealogy "stuff," by the time I got to the letter for this person's surname in the Flowers folder, I must have gotten tired of having a separate file for each researcher, and lumped them all together under "Flowers—Misc."

That was back in the 1990s. Today is the day I got to go through all those emails. By the time I made my first pass through the stack, I was tempted to change the title of today's post to "Grunt Work." The reason? All the letters I decided to keep are for records or descriptions I need to confirm are part of my online tree. Thus, that folder now joins several others in moving from my genealogy file cabinet to a to-do stack for follow-through.

I ran across several other exchanges of correspondence from the late 1990s in that folder, reminding me of just how many others I had met and worked with in those early years of online research. Since that was nearly twenty years ago now, I'm realizing there is a secondary reason for me to keep these letters: nearly each one of them contains an explanation for just how they were related to my mother-in-law's Flowers line. Fast forward to today's research milieu, with matches for DNA cousins in the mix; perhaps these old connections—added to my tree, thanks to the records from those old letters—can help me place a few DNA matches.

Forget that; perhaps some of my husband's DNA matches are with the grandchildren of these researchers.

Above: "Lane at Gerolstein [Germany]," 1891 oil on board by German landscape painter Fritz von Wille; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.