Do You Know Something I Don't Know?

 

The last few weeks have been rather rough. After promptly getting sick at home following a conference in Houston—where, in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, we had a downpour every day—I hardly had enough energy to drive myself into town to run errands. No matter; before my trip, I had unexpectedly spotted a black widow slithering under the driver seat of my car, and I was in no rush to commandeer the buggy thing until long after I had bug-bombed it. In the meantime, my daughter kindly chauffeured me to meetings and appointments while I recuperated.

Around here, with the arrival of August, school is back in session, and that isn't just the case for the kids. Our city's active seniors' lifelong learning organizations are hosting their own back-to-class sessions, and as their genealogy instructor, I was scheduled to attend one organization's social event at a local college on Friday. True, I had just spent a week enjoying rides in air conditioned comfort in my daughter's vehicle (while awaiting the demise of said black widow), but I was a bit taken back by my daughter's constant questioning, "Are you sure you don't want me to drive you to the meeting?" What I should have asked her was, "Do you know something I don't know?"

For some reason, my husband was also keenly aware of my meeting at the college. He walked into the lecture hall where our social gathering was being held just minutes after I received a surprise award for being volunteer of the year. I may catch on to things slowly, but at that point, it dawned on me I wasn't far off track in wondering why everyone was so particular about my meeting plans for the day.

Now that I'm pulling up records for my biweekly count, it occurred to me that that question—"Do you know something I don't know?"—is a useful question for all of us while we puzzle over our family tree. As I continue exchanging research discoveries with a newly-found Flannery researcher, I send her a copy of a family keepsake and realize I may be the only one in possession of such documentation. I knew something she didn't know, but now that I've shared it, she knows, too.

Sometime in the past two weeks while adding 131 more names to my in-laws' 36,284-person family tree, I uploaded an obituary from Newspapers.com which happened to mention the possible name of someone else's birth mother. That someone spotted that posted obituary and reached out to ask if I had any more information. Unfortunately, the connection stretched beyond the third cousin level and thus was no one I knew personally—you know me: bushy trees for DNA testing—but if I had, it would have been an answer I could have shared which that adoptee didn't otherwise know.

Someone out there does know, of course, no matter what the question might be. In the aggregate, the information assembled on multiple genealogy sites provides a multitude of searching people with answers, but in the end, there are still several questions left unanswered. However, in boxes passed down to us from grandparents or maiden aunts or bachelor uncles, or tucked in attics or even written on the backs of furniture or—yes! incredibly!—plastered within the walls of our homes may be the answers we thought we'd never find.

Or, to put it more specifically, someone else might be unearthing the answer to our questions...except that they don't yet realize that they know something we don't know. The challenge is how to connect the answers with the seekers.