All the Relatives Around Me

 

Travel times, especially during this holiday season, remind me of the very real possibility that, given any airport hallway, I could be passing a distant cousin unawares. There are relatives all around us—but how many of us know enough about our third or fourth cousins to pick them out as we pass by them in a crowded place?

One fun ice breaker we've used when there are a lot of visitors at our local genealogical society meetings has been to have everyone pull out their phone and check the "Relatives Around Me" tab on the FamilySearch.org app. At one of our now-rare in-person meetings a few months ago, I did just that. We were hosting a special meeting at our local FamilySearch center, with a speaker brought in from 120 miles away. There were lots of visitors in attendance, many of them avid users of the free tree-building program on the FamilySearch website. Before the social time at the end of our meeting, I did just that, having everyone log in to their app and setting the crowd abuzz with fun discoveries.

Granted, any results from such an app are wholly dependent on the accuracy of the data uploaded to researchers' own portion of the universal family tree on the website. Given the family trees on FamilySearch.org are mostly constructed by avocational family historians, there are bound to be unsupported assertions (in other words, just plain ol' mistaken identities). Still, the exercise is an ice breaker and gets people talking with each other about their own research.

After our meeting, one of our society members tapped me on the shoulder and said, "I don't know many people here, but I do know you," and held up her phone. There on the screen was a diagram of how she and I shared a distant ancestor. That supposed ancestor—about four generations preceding my brick wall fourth great-grandfather, Job Tison—would make us, if verifiable, seventh cousins twice removed.

The only problem was, as of the last time I had focused on Job Tison for my Twelve Most Wanted—in January of 2022—I could find all sorts of documents of his adult life in Glynn County, Georgia, during the early years of the 1800s, but very few records of the location of his origin. I have seen some assertions that Job was from Pitt County, North Carolina, and indeed I did find mention of a "Joab Tyson" there in the 1790 census.

Whether Joab Tyson in North Carolina was one and the same as Job Tison in Georgia, I am about to find out in February, when I tackle his life story once again for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026. That will hopefully become the gateway to discovering the identity of his parents and siblings, as well. If all goes well and discovery of the subsequent generation doesn't prove to become a brick wall of its own, perhaps my recently-discovered seventh cousin and I can build out our respective trees for the requisite three more generations to spot the nexus which makes us distant relatives.