There are Other Trees out There

Not all photo connections come, courtesy of the subscribers at Ancestry.com. In the case of the next Knapp photograph I recently sent home to family, I found that descendant thanks to Find A Grave.

Mind you, that descendant is alive and kicking, despite being found at Find A Grave. What happened is this: I kept running across items, in each Knapp family member's memorial at Find A Grave, with the name of one specific volunteer. Could it be possible that this avid researcher was somehow connected with the family I was researching?

I decided to test that hypothesis, and sent the mystery volunteer a message. Within a matter of a few hours, I had my confirmation. Here was another diligent researcher, working on her husband's line—the line of one of the grandsons of Peter (alias Jackson) Knapp, the infant in the 1899 portrait of two sons of George Harlow Knapp, William Malphus Knapp's brother.

As it turns out, this researcher is a font of information on the extended Knapp family. She shared with me so many fascinating stories and resources about William Malphus Knapp, his brothers, and his uncles. And yet, she has no tree posted at Ancestry. Though an active researcher, she finds she can keep her research budget low by posting her tree at Geni.com and locating digitized documents through FamilySearch.org.

In addition to that, she puts a lot of details she has gleaned onto Find A Grave, which is how I found her—a good reminder to me, when I am again faced with not being able to locate any descendants of an abandoned antique photograph.

Of course, I can't just say this researcher has found so many fascinating stories without actually sharing them with you. So...with tomorrow's post, we'll step back a generation or two to get our bearings, then delve into the first of two stories: the one about the Civil War veteran uncle for whom Peter (Jackson) Knapp was named. From there, we'll wander over to learn about another Knapp family relative from that same town in Cowlitz County, Washington, where we had found the family of Peter and Arthur Knapp in 1900, and peruse the shocking newspaper headlines from a city once known, due to its wild reputation, as "Little Chicago."