Family History is All About Connections

 

Family history can sometimes seem like a solitary pursuit: the lone researcher, sequestered in her office or musty archive, poring over documents long forgotten in search of that elusive brick wall ancestor. That certainly is how it feels, at times. This week, though, one instance of a person reaching out to send a message set in motion a chain of events connecting several people who had never before met each other.

It all started with a message received on my Ancestry account. A genealogist was reaching out from a family association, in hopes I could connect her to a woman I had listed in my family tree. The genealogist wanted to find this woman in order to access photographs the woman had, years ago, written the genealogist to say she'd be willing to share, if ever the genealogist got around to writing the promised book on the woman's own family line.

Well, now was the time to write that book, but obviously, if the genealogist could find that woman's name in my family tree, it meant only one thing: the woman was no longer alive.

Despite her passing years ago, I clearly remember speaking with that woman when she was still alive, because she herself had published a book on my own family's McClellan line. It was a well-researched book, and I was so excited when I had found it that I purchased not only one copy for myself, but several more to give to family members.

Apparently, I gave away one too many copies of that book. Years later, looking for my copy, I couldn't find it. Nor could my sister find her copy—who knows what happened to the other copies. Trying to purchase another copy was unsuccessful; it was long out of print. Besides, by then, the author had passed away.

But then came that message at Ancestry from this other book-writing genealogist looking for the author of my family's story. And here I was, having moved on from my Florida-based research project last month, yet still looking for the descendants of those Townsend and Charles lines—one of which happened to marry a McClellan.

This month, I was still inputting Townsend, Charles, and McClellan descendants into my tree at Ancestry.com when up popped one of those ubiquitous hints: someone else also had that McClellan ancestor in their family tree. Usually, I don't use that hint option, choosing instead to rely on my own document-based research. But hey, wait a minute: the tree's owner was someone with that same surname. I think I found a cousin!

Looking closely at that tree, I realized the Ancestry subscriber happened to descend from that same specific branch as the McClellan author. Taking a chance, I reached out to that tree owner and told my story about the genealogist from the family association wanting to get copies of those pictures for a soon-to-be-published book. Could this person help? And, oh, by the way, any idea how I could get a copy of that book I lost from the tree owner's immediate family contacts?

There is something magical about posting a message online at night, then waking up the next morning with the answer I'd never expect to receive. I usually give my email address in notes I send via Ancestry's messaging service. What had just happened overnight was that that McClellan contact sent me a digitized version of the book I had long since lost—and promised to work on gathering those family photographs for the genealogist back at the family association, the one whose initial message had gotten this whole search rolling in the first place.

Each one of us sits on a treasure trove of our own family's history: the photos, the keepsakes and memorabilia, the stories. Those details are not just ours, though; they belong to all our cousins, close as well as distant. The blank spot in our tree might be the labeled photograph in someone else's pedigree; the letter passed down to us that was saved by our great-grandparents might have come from another cousin's great-grandmother.

Just as our families intertwined in those past generations of our greats and great-greats, so we can do once again in our interconnected world now. From fun family tree apps like FamilySearch's "Relatives Around Me" or the recent "Relatives at RootsTech," we have quick and easy tools at our fingertips to reach out and touch someone else's life—or at least their family history progress. Connections with cousins can make it possible for us to know the rest of our family's story.