Writing to Family You've Never Met

 

Is there anyone out there besides genealogists who find themselves writing letters to family members they've never met?

Last week, I received a message from a fifth cousin. Not too many people can make a claim like that. Those of us keen on making connections via DNA testing, however, have learned to build out our family tree to include "descendants of" as well as "ancestors of" entries. Getting a note with confirmation that it is from a distant family member takes not much more effort to confirm than to pull up that ever-expanding database called an online family tree. My tree provided the relationship without my having to sketch out any back-of-napkin calculations.

The thing with that contact, though, is that I now find such messages few and far between. With the convenience of online genealogy comes a down side: family history is no longer a team effort, but a solitary expedition. We don't even have to coerce the family into taking that family vacation detour to snap a photo of Aunt Daisy's headstone; we can just look it up on Find A Grave. In the comfort of our own home. At 3:00 a.m., when everyone else is sleeping.

Think about it: when was the last time you reached out to a fellow family researcher you don't even know, to collaborate on a brick wall problem, or to share resources? Did you even receive an answer? How did it go?

Switching roles from instigator to recipient, what was that experience like? Was it for a correct connection? How recent was your last message received? Was it a one-shot question and answer, or did it blossom into an ongoing research partnership?

For whatever reason, it seems the mere gesture of reaching out to a stranger who shares at least a budding interest—if not an outright passion—in common with us as family historians is intimidating. Perhaps it's the fear of the unknown: of how our message will be received, of whether scrutiny will read between lines which aren't even there to misconstrue. There are numerous blog posts offering advice to tentative family historians on how to connect with researchers in other branches of their family. Is it really so scary that we need that much advice?

Perhaps the idea of posting a generic comment in a forum—or, to update the scenario, in social media—is less threatening. We can ask our "does anybody know" question under guise of a user name and, if the question merits the label "silly" or "dumb," we can always backpedal and tag it, "asking for a friend." The answer may or may not return to us, of course, for social media can be that way—or if the right response is provided, lacking search mechanisms, we may never find it by scrolling through the endless loop of such services. But neither do we need to privately suffer cringe-worthy responses, either. We are safe yet uninformed in our anonymous forays into groups.

Yet, services like many online family tree companies provide ways for us to message other individual researchers. The communication is direct, immediate (well, if the recipient signs in and sees the tiny flagging system), and can lead to potential answers. It helps to keep a few things in mind when choosing that method of communication.

• Don't assume the other researcher is your enemy. Be cordial, clear, and invite collaboration. We used to call this type of communication a "query" because we are sending just that: a request for help, not a command to cooperate.
• Don't assume recipients have nothing better to do with their time than wait for your letter. Some researchers have found themselves avoiding their messages because they have been barraged with notes from other subscribers, or because of an unexpected recent family history discovery which they find troubling. A kind tone, a humble plea may go much farther in eliciting a response.
• Don't equate your request with an all-or-nothing scenario. Most research partnerships between distant cousins begin with a sense that collaboration is a two way street: I have something you need, and you also can provide helpful information to me. We are all exploring this family history mystery together.

In all my years of researching family history, I have encountered both the demanding messages that would make any recipient shudder, and I have met the most gracious distant cousins any researcher would be honored to call family. On account of the former type, I know other researchers who have gone so far as to shut themselves off from any contact—making their Ancestry tree private and unsearchable, for instance, because of insulting communication—to avoid any troubling messages in the future. What a loss for the research community in general.

On the other hand, I have had the most rewarding long-term research relationships with other distant cousins, in which we have continued over years, sometimes, to share discoveries and push the envelope on our shared brick wall challenges. To think the loss of some of these fruitful relationships could all come down to the wording in a first-impression message is staggering. Perhaps that is why some of us hesitate to send out that first contact. Yet, writing that first letter, then setting it aside for a second review later before finally sending it on its way, may save us from ourselves and those unintended slights that can so easily be misinterpreted.

Yes, there may be some for whom genealogy is indeed a lone endeavor, but I am still firmly convinced—poorly worded letters aside—that family history is a team effort. Not just in the quest to make discoveries, but in the afterglow of sharing that sense of research victory. When we grow big enough to see beyond a poor choice of wording and reach out to nurture research alliances, perhaps we will win more people over to join our team.  

 

Working on Theories of Relatives

 

Stuck on how to tie together all those Falvey DNA matches I'm following, I was encouraged to see that MyHeritage has released an update to the research aid they dubbed their Theory of Family Relativity™. MyHeritage heralds this feature as "game-changing," and when they first released it over a year ago, it certainly was a game changer for my paternal grandfather's mystery Polish ancestry. 

Now, however, my challenge is to tie together the several DNA matches my husband has with unidentified distant cousins who all claim an ancestor from the Falvey family in County Kerry, Ireland—but which Falvey family that might lead to is still the question.

Right now, my behind-the-scenes task is building a private, unsearchable tree which diagrams how each DNA match traces back to County Kerry through their original immigrant ancestor. In this case, it involves reversing the path that Falveys traveled from Ireland not only to the United States, but also to England, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The only drawback to this diagramming exercise: each line leads back to a different root person. And I still can't figure out how all of them are connected.

Despite this dilemma, it still helps to visualize the path from each DNA match through their ancestral generations, so I'm left with a quite disjointed tree, leaving some ancestors in place in the tree marked with a warning sign and identified as a "hypothesis" rather than an assertion. Other ancestors are left in the online tree, detached from any connection to the rest of the Falveys, as a "floating" ancestor. Someday, somehow, maybe I'll discover the key to re-attach those lines back to the rest of the family.

Or not.

Any one of these lines could lead back to the answer I seek. Only problem is: I don't know which one. So I keep diagramming, attaching documentation in support, and then move on to send a message to the next DNA match and draw the next family tree.

Sometimes, utilizing DNA can lead to instant answers, but in the cases I've worked on, the answer seems to be much more muddled. Perhaps it's just because the people related to us aren't the DNA test-taking type. In cases like ours, it becomes clear that finding the answer may need to be a team effort rather than a solo performance. That's why I have always liked the genealogy research model developed in the earliest days of the Internet: forums where people could come together to share information on joint research projects.

I'm tempted to see how many Falvey researchers would be up for collaborating on this puzzle. After all, there are several trees out there—not to mention, Falvey descendants who have already tested. Hopefully, someone has been gifted with some oral history of their ancestors' homeland in answer to my questions. Otherwise, all we're left with will be theories.

⚠️

Above: Warning icon I attach to those "theories" added to my family tree—a bright sign that though the entry is based on an educated guess, it is simply that, and no more: a guess. This is an idea inspired by Connie Knox of GenealogyTV in her episode "DNA Cousin Matches: Next Steps."

Missing Researchers Long Gone

 

It was late on New Year's Day in 2003 when I took a look at my email notifications from GenForum, an old messaging system used by family history enthusiasts. It was there that researchers could post their requests for help and connection, specific to either surnames or local geographic areas. 

Earlier in the previous year, I had gone wandering, much like I have this month, in an attempt to figure out the connection between my husband's second great-grandfather, John Kelly, and a man by the name of Timothy Kelly. The two Kelly men surely were related in some way, as they had gone in together on the purchase of a family burial plot at the Catholic Cemetery in Fort Wayne, Indiana. But how, I couldn't figure out.

I had gone from John Kelly's family tree, to constructing a private unsearchable tree for Timothy Kelly's family, to tracing the line of Timothy's second wife, a woman by the name of Mary Danehy. As she had brought a daughter into the Kelly marriage, I was in the midst of even attempting to discover the origin of that step-daughter—of whom all I knew was her name, Margaret Sweeney—when I got a reply to my query.

The answer said simply,

Timothy Kelly married my GG Aunt in 1880. Her name was Mary Danehy. Timothy and his first wife Ellen...had six children.

 

This, of course, I already knew, but perhaps it wasn't evident to my respondent. After all, having gone so far afield of my original research goal, I had posted my request in the forum for Sweeney family researchers, not in the Kelly department. However, this respondent followed up with one irresistible question: "Where do you fit into the picture?"

There began a long volley of emails, as two researchers traced the various paths leading to their nexus, a man in Fort Wayne who himself somehow got there from some place in County Kerry, Ireland. We exchanged notes. Shared most recent discoveries. Even traded photocopies of newspaper clippings and documents by snail mail from one end of the country to the other at a time when not everything was at our fingertips online. Yet, despite all our earnest efforts, we still couldn't make the connection or trace the Kelly family back to their place of origin.

Eventually, my corresponding researcher sent me a note. It was following the time of the second Gulf War, and he had decided to use his experience in the construction industry to serve as a contractor in Afghanistan to rebuild schools in that country. Promising to pick up on our joint research venture upon his return home, he was off to a land where genealogical pursuits were not highest among their priorities.

Several years passed, and I began to wonder how he had fared on his adventure. I tried updated emails without any answer. Finally, because this researcher had such an unusual name, I tried googling it. Sadly, I found my answer through a lovingly crafted obituary posted on Find A Grave.

Even though it's been nearly two decades since that first email opened up the opportunity to share a research project with a fellow family member, I still think about endeavors like that. Of course, on the easy side, now knowing what I've been able to discover about Timothy Kelly, I wish there was a way to utilize DNA testing to see whether that venue would provide corroboration. But more important than that, experiences like the many research connections made in those past genealogy forums remind me of the value of connecting with other researchers—and continuing to work together to find answers to our family history questions.

Some research questions simply cannot be answered without sustained effort, persevering through many steps until we find the answer we need. Sometimes, such efforts are better achieved in partnership with others pursuing the same answers. Yet, it seems it has been a long time since I've met up with others willing to collaborate to that extent. I've seen some people complain that they are lucky to even receive just one reply to an emailed inquiry. Were such diligent researchers just a product of a bygone generation? Where have they all gone?

Of course, I'll still plod onward with my Kelly questions. There are, after all, encouraging signs linking Timothy Kelly to Abbie—or Debora, or Gobnait, or whoever she turns out to be—and they, in turn, seem to be linked to someone named John Kelly. And yet, on the other hand, there are confusing signs that just don't seem to add up right.

Whatever the conclusion of the matter, though, it will likely be through some solitary effort that I'll arrive at an answer—no matter how much I yearn to find those research partners of decades now gone. But I can still hope there are others out there who realize it is certainly more fun to share the research adventure together.

 

Calling for Collaboration

With the advent of so many companies catering to the lone genealogist, one would think the pursuit of family history has become a solitary sport. After all, with the click of a mouse, we have a world of documentation at our fingertips at any hour of day or night. And yet, everything from the details built into the system at online websites to the social media resources surrounding us encourages us to take back the solitary isolation of this research road and blend in some collaboration.

That's what I've been doing lately with my current research goal. I'm on the hunt for the names of Johanna Falvey's parents in County Kerry, Ireland. Johanna, once she was married to John Kelly and proud parent to Timothy, Catherine, and Mary, had left her homeland for Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the United States, but clues in her obituary showed me that she had left "several sisters" back home near the Lakes of Killarney, and that one sibling who also emigrated arrived on the shores of New Zealand sometime before her 1903 death.

While collaboration between avocational genealogists has changed over the years—gone are many of the genealogy forums of the earlier years of Internet usage—we still have many avenues useful for connecting. And yet, I know several researchers have tried to reach out and been disappointed in the results. Many a DNA match has complained that no one responds to an introductory message, or gives the most enigmatic of one-liner responses, true, but there are others out there who are still quite willing to collaborate. Face it: those of us who have been smitten by the genealogy bug can discuss our passion for hours. What better discovery than to find a like-minded researcher seeking the very same family!

Step one has always been to contact others whose tree or DNA test shows a promising connection. Services such as Ancestry make that easy for us to do. For the past two weeks, I've been working my way through a list of contacts, asking them if they would be willing to collaborate on finding our Falvey connection back in County Kerry.

The result so far has been pleasantly positive, but you never know what the outcome to such an inquiry might be. That, in essence, is why we should connect with fellow researchers: someone may be out there with a private collection of family memorabilia which includes the exact tidbit you are seeking. It may be a family Bible, or a photograph, or a newsy letter sent back home to the folks over one hundred years ago. We seek what we don't know is there precisely in the hopes that someone else will know where to find it.

Part of my current research plan has been to evaluate the family trees of the several small DNA matches between my husband—Johanna's second great-grandson—and other Falvey descendants. It's a lot of work, admittedly, and may involve building out others' own trees to check accuracy, but even that task doesn't need to be done alone.

I reached out to yet another Falvey match late this week who, despite being a small match of ten centiMorgans, has a Falvey ancestor from the correct county in Ireland who was born there at about the same time as our Johanna. Despite the slim chances of relationship—the connection is only ten cMs, after all—this DNA match happens to have closer relatives who still live in County Kerry, and is most willing to help with this project. You never know what you will find, just for the asking.

And it's not just a matter of asking once for the answer to one simple question. To find a number of distant cousins all willing to continue working on a joint research question—now, that is the key. I know one family history researcher who, thanks to DNA testing, put together a fuller story on one entire mystery branch of her family's story. Hers wasn't just a one-question-and-thanks-a-lot instance; she and her new-found distant cousins put together a private Facebook group so that they can continue the conversation. They set up a convenient means to share ongoing research discoveries. Now, that's instant collaboration!

Whether my Falvey research question will ever lead to that level of continued collaboration is yet to be seen. But that research network is growing, now stretching out to three continents, with emails reaching around the world. Collaboration enables us to accelerate our research progress, but it also affords us the opportunity to get social and meet others who are interested in the same specific research questions. Together, we amplify each other's progress.

"Oh, I Heard That One, Too"

Vanquishing those persistent family legends may become one of my goals as I work my way through my many family lines leading back to Virginia. The Booth surname, in particular, presents a family story which not only refuses to die, but has become so widespread that it may never be snuffed out.

Just thinking of the surname Booth may prompt you to recall one southern sympathizer of infamy who possessed that very name: John Wilkes Booth. Yes, the man at the center of the biggest man-hunt to date in 1865 Washington, D.C., may have been reported shot and killed, but the story still lives that the man who died at the hands of a Union sharpshooter may not have been John Wilkes Booth, after all. And in that bait and switch, in the conflagration of the moment, the real John Wilkes Booth supposedly escaped to the South and lived out his days at a horse ranch in Texas.

That horse ranch, supposedly, was none other than the property of Quinton Boothe, eldest son of William Alexander Boothe, my second great-grandfather. While it is true that Quinton Boothe moved to Texas after the Civil War, and while he did end up with a fair amount of property there, when I first heard that story as a child, I chalked it up to my maternal grandfather telling one of his fabulous, unbelievable stories. One could never be sure, with him, whether he was pulling the leg of his listeners for fun, or actually detailing a factual—though incredible—report.

Fast-forward to the age of the Internet and the birth of a new kind of family history research: online genealogy forums. I'd run into people on these forums who also were researching the Boothe/Booth line and, eventually, someone I never met would recount that very story of the incredible escape of John Wilkes Booth. We'd get into a group conversation about the tale, and the typical response would be, "Oh, I heard that one, too."

But...everyone hearing it? That's quite the persistent family legend for people so distantly related to have all heard the same thing.

The messiest part of the story, however, was one added detail: that the reason the assassin escaped to that particular location was that William Alexander Boothe's family was related to him.

Try as I might, I have not been able to find documentation demonstrating any such connection. Of course, you might already have assumed that outcome, and I wouldn't blame you—but you can't fault me for trying to demonstrate by evidence whether the vote is yay or nay about that claim. After all, the story is so persistent that I even got a phone call, a few years ago, from someone who was considering attempting legal procedures to exhume the supposed burial location for purposes of DNA testing.

That attempt has been tried before—even the nameless author of the blurb attached to John Wilkes Booth's Find A Grave memorial noted that "modern day legal efforts to exhume the remains for DNA testing and identification were eventually rejected."

Whether that question will ever be tested and put to rest is beyond the scope of my own family history—despite having actually found someone who contorted William Alexander Boothe's family tree on one online service to place him as brother of John Wilkes Booth and son of Junius Brutus Booth. What I can move towards, though, is to encourage male descendants of my William Alexander Boothe to participate in Y-DNA testing, especially joining the Booth DNA project at Family Tree DNA.

Though I don't yet know who my Alexander's father might have been, it turns out that, despite the loss of many early records in his native Nansemond County, Virginia, the very 1840 census enumeration in which I found his record puts his name only a few entries away from another man of the same surname. It is quite possible that, tracing a descendancy chart for the other Boothe families in Nansemond County, we could put together a project to test descendants of the various Boothe lines in that county to see which ones, if any, belong to the same line.

The big "if" in that case all depends on who that other Boothe man in Nansemond was—and if he had any sons...who had sons...who had sons...

Someone Else's Aunt Anna

Perhaps it is owing to the commonness of the given name Anna that so many people can say they have an Aunt Anna. I do. My Polish cousin's father obviously did, for even though Anna Gramlewicz Jablonski was far removed from her family in Poland, she regularly sent letters back home and kept up on the family news.

It was thanks to a genealogy forum almost ten years ago that I discovered yet another person who could call this same Anna her Aunt Anna. Unlike my Polish cousin, this woman was descended from the little brother of Vincent Jablonski, Anna's husband. Anna was actually her mother's aunt; her mother grew up in the same apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, in which Anna had lived after Vincent died in 1943.

I got the first note from this Jablonski relative after she had seen my forum post on what was then genealogy.com. Of course, I was ecstatic to connect with someone who said Anna Gramlewicz was her own mother's Aunt Anna. Although the forum concept is so helpful, it was not often that a legitimate response materialized from one of my forays on these online sites.

Because this woman's mother grew up in the same housing complex as her cousins—the children of Vincent and Anna Jablonski—she likely was quite close to those relatives. Subsequent emails came well stocked with details on Anna's children and grandchildren. There was even a little bit on the great-grandchildren of one branch in Anna's tree. She provided me with current addresses of those who were still living, so I had up to date locations of where Anna's descendants had settled, as recently as seven years ago.

This other researcher, as it turns out, had also begun putting her records in a family tree online at Ancestry.com, so I've been able to see details as she adds them. And most recently, she mentioned considering doing DNA testing, although because we do not descend from the same common ancestor, it wouldn't reveal any helpful information for Anna's side of the family.

She even shared an old photograph of her side of the Jablonski family, which I loved seeing, even though it didn't include any members of my side of the family. It was still fun seeing how handsome Vincent was, and wondering if that was where his daughter Irene got her own classic facial features that were so photogenic in her engagement announcement, back in 1940.

With every little bit of detail added by these fellow researchers who found me online, the story of our immigrant ancestors grows clearer. I'm certainly thankful for everyone who has been willing to share their part of the family saga.

There was one more member of this Gramlewicz family who didn't share that immigrant part of the story: Anna's baby brother Hieronym. Born somewhere in Poland after his parents decided to leave New York City for good in 1912, his was the part of the family story which eventually provided the connection with my Polish cousin whose initial email to me in 2005 got this whole research project started in the first place.

Above: Undated photograph of the Jablonski family. Standing in the top row, from left to right, are Sigmond, Vincent (Anna's future husband), their mother, Marianne, and Mae; seated in the front row are Bertha, Viola, their father Alexander, Stephen and Lottie. Photograph courtesy Beth Galyon from the family's private collection; used by permission.

Meet My Polish Cousin

It was one of those emails all genealogists hope to get: a note from far away, declaring as fact the cousinhood of a complete stranger.

In this case, it wasn't owing to any post I had written—a hope each one of us genea-bloggers harbors—but an email sent, thanks to a query I had placed on one of those throwbacks to 1990s research: the genealogy forum.

The email reached me on October 18, 2005, giving you an idea how long this part of my research has remained dormant. For the next two years, this newly-introduced cousin and I exchanged many emails—about those Gramlewicz family members who had returned to Poland from Brooklyn and what had become of them, about our mutual ancestors, about family now, about life.

This cousin started with a simple introduction. She told me her name—an anglicized form of her Polish given name plus the surname Gramlewicz—and explained that she had found my information on the Internet. She had likely been Googling her surname in hopes of discovering something about her roots.

To prove her cousinhood, this stranger laid out her specific connection to my family tree. She gave me her father's name—he is still alive and living in Poland—and his father's name. That elder man was the one child born to Anna Gramlewicz's parents after they had left Brooklyn to return to their homeland. They had named him Hieronim—the English equivalent being Jerome.

Just to make sure of the connection, her introductory letter detailed much more about the Gramlewicz children who had been born in New York. She told me whom each of the daughters had married and what had become of them. She shared so much more detail in this note and in the many that followed, that it would be difficult to do it all justice by trying to cram it all into one post here.

It was enough to know I had made a connection with an unknown cousin—especially one born in Poland, where the family had returned—but to have an ongoing relationship with such a cousin, well, I treasured the opportunity. Not just because of the genealogical information she provided or the way in which we could work together to piece the entire story together, but because I now had a tangible connection with an aspect of my paternal roots which, inexplicably, my own grandparents had worked so hard to keep hidden. 

Then the emails tapered off. Life has a way of interfering like that. After the end of 2007, a few notes were exchanged in the next year, then nothing for an entire year after that. The last I heard from this cousin was just before Christmas in 2013.

It's hard, when you get to know someone solely from online contact, to see that person entirely vanish after that. A friendship built entirely on the mental constructs evolving from that many correspondences may seem unreal—as if not ever having met face to face "in real life" equals never getting to know someone—but it seemed just as tangible to me as if we had gotten together each week to chat over coffee.

This week, I'll share some of the information this cousin revealed on what became of those immigrant Gramlewiczes who chose rather to return to their homeland than remain in the adventure they had attempted in a new land. It certainly broadened my horizons to access these details I'd never otherwise have been able to know. Hopefully, in sharing these details online, this may someday, again, be the inspiration for someone else to connect and say, "Hi, I found your information on the Internet."

Or—who knows?—perhaps find my missing cousin, all over again.

Above: "A Path at Les Sablons," 1883 oil on canvas by Impressionist artist Alfred Sisley; courtesy Google Art Project via Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Finding Herby

The trouble with researching one's roots from another country is that, to do so, it helps to understand the native language. So, to research my Gramlewicz roots—and, by extension, the Laskowski relatives who likely came from the same village—I would have to be able to work in Polish.

Problem: I don't speak Polish.

That problem didn't stop me when I was still tracking the Gramlewicz folks back in New York City, even though I did learn to search for them in some unexpected places, like the Italian Genealogical Group's website. (For websites like that, you don't have to be Italian; your family just needs to live in a part of NYC.) But when it came to jumping the pond and landing in Poland—or German-occupied Poland, or Prussia, or whatever politically-correct term was being used at the time—it helped to know a bit about the local lingo.

Back when I was first attacking this research issue, services like Ancestry were in their nascent state. Genealogists learned how to make do by reaching out to each other, sharing their quandaries, and pooling their knowledge in a crowdsourcing effort for mutual assistance.

That's when I first learned about Herby.

Herby was this website which could tell you where all the Polish folks with your target surname might have been living, by province, in 1990. Well, let me correct that: not all the population. About ninety four percent of them. Missing were folks from about eighteen locations throughout the country—enough to add up to about six percent of the total population of the country. But hey. It's better than nothing.

Now that I'm picking that research quest back up for my Polish roots, I had to dust off my notes and see if Herby was still around on the Internet or whether it had simply vanished into the ether. I did a Google search to see what I could find, and was pleased to see that someone had resurrected an old blog post by a researcher whose name I remembered from those earlier, genealogy forum using years: Fred Hoffman. Thanks to the website run by JRI-Poland ("Jewish Records Indexing Poland"), Fred Hoffman's article explaining "Herby" is still available online—an excellent resource if you want to understand more about this Polish website; I advise you take the time to read it.

Of course, if you need no help understanding phrases like "Proszę wprowadzić nazwisko," you are all set to jump in on your own and search for your ancestors. The rest of us need some hand-holding while we learn the ropes on navigating Polish websites like Herby. That is where I found those old genealogy forums to be invaluable. Of course, now, in the hacking zeitgeist of our era, most people assume they can enter a surname in the dialog box directly under that Polish phrase. And they'd be right; the phrase means "please enter a name."

Then, too, now we have Google Translate. Back in the nineties, we didn't.

In the hopes of finding resources to help me with surname mapping for the Gramlewicz family, I put Herby through its paces. I entered "Gramlewicz" in the search box, and hit "Szukaj"—er, "Search."

The website—which looks suspiciously like it hasn't been updated since 1990—came up with a series of codes in response to my query. To find out what the codes mean, you have to click on the highlighted phrase near the top, "Tutaj znajdują się objaśnienia skrótów." ("Here are the abbreviations.") The codes pop up in a box, in which is embedded another hyperlink leading to a map of the regions detailed in the first box.

As for the Gramlewicz name, there were four provinces in which people with this surname were found: one in Warsaw, one in Lublin, three in Katowice, and six in Bydgoszcz.

While having such information is great—it is certainly much more than I knew before this point—it wasn't entirely helpful. For one thing, I am totally lacking in familiarity with Polish geography. Forget about any geopolitical boundaries—I am clueless what is where.

But there was one more problem: even if I knew the provinces in which those Gramlewiczes lived in 1990, come 1998, everything changed as far as provinces were concerned. The geopolitical map of Poland was redrawn and boundaries changed. Just when I thought I had my answer.

The next task, then, became juxtaposing the discovery on Herby with the more recent map of Polish provinces since the lines were redrawn in 1998. And, just as I had found when fellow researchers shared with me the news about Herby, there were other resources to use that would help with this task, as well.

Above: "Femmes séchant le linge" (Women drying the laundry), undated oil on canvas by Belgian artist Évariste Carpentier (1845 - 1922); courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

A Rare Encounter

When I first started researching my father's family, about the only thing I knew for sure was the name of his maternal grandparents: Laskowski. Anton (or sometimes Antoni) and Mary Laskowski had emigrated from Poland sometime in the 1880s.

Although that Polish country of origin was kept a deep, dark secret in the family for the next two generations, now that we have access to records as commonplace as the United States Census enumerations for 1900, 1910, and 1920, it's quite plain to see.

Perhaps that transparency would have been dismaying to my grandmother, their daughter, but she is no longer here to put up any fuss about revealing the secret she wished to keep. She was gone long before I arrived on the scene, let alone when I began to flex my genealogical research muscles.

That open record policy has done me a few more good turns, including the gift of clues tipping me off about related surnames in their family. In addition to the Aktabowski surname I'm pursuing, I found a young woman in the Laskowski household in the 1915 state census by the surname Gramlewicz. Head of household Anton had listed her as his niece, which, depending on the ethnic tradition, may have meant, literally, that she was his niece—or may have included one of any number of other euphemisms for familial relationships.

Although I tend to assume Anna Gramlewicz was actually Anton Laskowski's niece—likely, he had a sister who married a man by that surname—there was one other detail which opened up the possibility of a double relationship between the Laskowski and Gramlewicz families: according to Anton's 1935 death certificate, his mother was also a Gramlewicz.

There is both a blessing and a curse to researching surnames as rare as Gramlewicz. For one thing, if any entry is found under that surname, unlike such cases as researching Smith or Jones, there is a much higher probability that it is material having to do with one's own family. On the other hand, because it is such an unusual name, it runs a higher chance of being misspelled or misunderstood. Even when it is spelled correctly, uncertain transcriptions of handwriting can falsely render a correctly-spelled version of the name into something impossible to find on a computer-aided search.

We'll take a look, tomorrow, at some Gramlewicz records I have managed to find, over the years, but for now, let's consider the reverse of that quest of mine to find material on the Gramlewicz family: the possibility that someone else will find me.

For whatever reason, about ten years ago, someone halfway around the world from here sat down at her computer and typed in her surname to see what the search engine would bring up. Among the results—which, considering the word she entered was "Gramlewicz," couldn't have been too many—was a forum entry requesting more information from anyone else researching that surname. That entry was posted by—you guessed it—me. The woman, also a Gramlewicz descendant, was a Polish woman living in Italy who, thanks to her schooling, had learned to speak and read English.

She decided to send me an email.

As the blessings of researching unusual surnames go, you know the probability of our relationship was high. As the two of us exchanged emails over the course of the next few years, my newly-found distant cousin filled in the blanks for me of what became of my Gramlewicz family from Brooklyn, New York. She had known, from her childhood, that there was the occasional letter sent out to America from her older relatives, and that, for a long time, there would be letters in reply. Of course, at some point, the letter exchange vanished, but she had never made the effort to figure out what had happened—or who it was in that far-away place who had always answered those letters.

We think we had it figured out: it likely was Annie Gramlewicz, the eighteen year old niece found in the 1915 New York State census, who had taken a position as a saleslady in a Brooklyn store and asked to stay at the small apartment of her uncle, Antoni Laskowski.

The rest of the story—of why Annie didn't just stay in her parents' home in Queens, and what had become of them—was something we figured out, partly through discussions via email exchange, and partly as more and more census enumerations and vital records became available online.

That I had such a wonderful resources in this bilingual distant cousin from halfway around the world was a blessing, but it didn't last forever. Into every life must, at some point, come some turmoil, and unfortunately, this also happened to her. Sadly, I lost contact with her. Then, out of the blue, we reconnected—she had left Italy and returned to her parents' home briefly. And then, once again, no answer.

In hopes that, just like that last time over ten years ago, someone will stumble across this mention of the Gramlewicz family, I'll begin tomorrow to explain just what happened to Annie and her family. Maybe, just maybe, another virtual encounter will lead to connecting with family members once again.

Above: Sunset in Ostend, undated oil on canvas by Belgian painter Évariste Carpentier (1845 - 1922); courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Why Checking Collateral Lines is Not a Waste of Time

If you read my post yesterday about my current research strategy, you may have thought I am about to engage in a colossal waste of time. Despite the relative rarity of the surname—in this case, I'm pursuing the Aktabowski family in 1890s New York and New Jersey—it may not seem I have a strong enough indication that the surname is guaranteed to link to my Laskowski family.

Yet, what are the chances that a name as rare as that would not be related to the people in my family? I already have two instances of the name showing up in my family tree: most recently, with my paternal grandmother's brother's marriage to an Aktabowski from New Jersey, and in the preceding generation, a woman whose mother's maiden name was Aktabowska (the female form of that Polish surname). Since so few Aktabowskis had headed to the New York metro area in that time frame, what would be the chances that there was a connection?

Back in 2002, when I first explored that concept, I felt I was finding some encouraging leads. If nothing else, I was connecting with distant cousins who seemed to affirm the link. Since that was still part of the time period when genealogy forums flourished, I ended up meeting (online) a distant Aktabowski cousin with whom I exchanged a number of emails. We were both earnestly researching that line, and glad to share our discoveries with each other. Genealogy forums, back then, were great for making that sort of connection, and it seemed there were more of those types of researchers readily available and willing to intelligently discuss research possibilities.

Beyond that initial foray into exploration of that Aktabowski connection, I've since run into people, from time to time, who mention that their Aktabowski relatives would tell them they are related to my line. (Handily for me, not only was my father known in New York City circles on account of his being a professional musician, but from that exposure to the world of "show biz," my brother catapulted his own acting career and was well known in the New York City metro area, himself. It was often in reference to that relationship that the older Aktabowski generation would say, "You know, we're related to him...")

However, Aktabowski is not the only collateral line I'm pursuing in hopes of uncovering more about my paternal family history. Besides that confusing name swap on the death certificates for the female side of the Laskowski family, there was another surname that danced around the edges of the male side of the Laskowski line: Gramlewicz.

I first became aware of the Gramlewicz connection thanks to the 1915 New York State census. There, in the Brooklyn household of my great grandparents, Anton and Mary Laskowski, was someone listed as Anna Gramlewicz. She was listed as Anton's niece. She was eighteen years of age at the time, born in the not-very-helpful designation of "U.S." and was working as a saleslady.

As it turned out, since I had also sent for Antoni's death certificate—he died in Kings County in 1935—that very surname had shown up as the maiden name for his own mother. Thus, not only could I connect the Gramlewicz name to the right side of the family—and presume it was a sister of Anton who connected us with the Gramlewicz family—but that instance of the maiden name showed me that there was a likelihood of further intermarriage in the family, too.

Once I pursued that lead, again around 2002, the same sort of thing happened: I ran into a cousin who was also researching that line. Only this connection was a fascinating find. Just as others have found distant cousins interested in the genealogy of mutual family lines by Googling their ancestors' names, this cousin had found me via my posts on genealogy forums. There was one difference to this connection, though: this woman was herself Polish, and at the time was living in Italy. I would never have found her if she hadn't come looking for me!

Based on a few other facts we pieced together through online corroboration, we figured out we were third cousins. I'll share more of the story as to how our families connect tomorrow, but suffice it to say she provided me with information I likely would never otherwise have found through my own plodding research progress.

There was one critical ingredient I had contributed to the discoveries, though: if I hadn't thrown my query out into the researcher's ring, nothing would have been out there for anyone else to stumble upon. If I had focused solely on my own direct lines and never wandered beyond those restrictive confines, I wouldn't have made any public mention of the possibilities of specific connections. And if I hadn't talked it up about how these other surnames might somehow lead me to pertinent discoveries in my own research quandaries, those words wouldn't have been out there on which Google (and other search engines) could work their magic.

Above: New York State census for 1915, showing Annie Gramlewicz in the Brooklyn household of my great grandparents, Anton and Mary Laskowski; image courtesy Ancestry.com.
  

The Economy of Free

I ran across a thought-provoking article the other day—an old one, admittedly, and not one specifically related to genealogy, but my mind has ways to overcome disconnects and instead build rabbit trails. Just call it my specialty: linking mechanisms.

The article was one of those futuristic what-if pieces: if the goal of technology—at least the computer-driven AI variety—is to keep developing the science until all the tasks previously done by humankind can be relegated to the level of automation, then what becomes of the world of work as we know it?

That's an interesting question. After all, if all of us eighteenth-century farmers had mechanized means to do our planting and harvesting, then—wait, we already have that now. We can squeeze more productivity out per acre than we've ever been able to do since the dawn of civilization. And we can spin more yarn, weave more blankets, make more suits and mass produce more stuff than a great deal of the First World nations can manage to use in any given year. That's an example of mechanized industry.

That speed-production has its by-products. One of them is more time for things other than subsistence. We no longer need to spend eighteen hours out of every twenty four, working just to produce enough food for tomorrow's meal. We can spend at least two of those hours sitting at a dead standstill in rush hour traffic.

We have choices and options. While it is true that we exchange one set of worries—about subsistence survival—for another, we also have many items in excess. And money—our means of exchange—in excess equals the opportunity to buy ourselves more free time. Maybe not in the same work week, but at some point in our lives.

That's where we sometimes shift from an economy driven by money to an economy in which money is no longer the object. Money shifts from being a potential reward to a stored commodity. It becomes a way to pay our life's ransom.

Not only that, but money becomes a means of exchange for experiences—instead of experience earning money, it is money earning us experiences. Whether we take a leave of absence from our job to stay home and raise a family, take a sabbatical to travel, or retire early to pursue a lifelong passion, the experience is filled with intrinsic factors other than those driven by money. While it may have taken money to launch us into those experiences, once we have bridged that gap, we enter a different world of exchange: one in which we are free to do and be, without a demand for payment.

If you haven't recognized yourself in this equation by now, it also includes those times—at least in the traditional world of genealogy—when we found ourselves "paying it forward" because someone else, at some point, helped us out. For free. Our voluntary services themselves became the medium of exchange. You helped me, so I'll go and help someone else.

Historically, genealogy—at least in the twentieth century—was full of such instances. We've been happy when someone else more knowledgeable than us—or in the right county, or interested in the same surname—chose to help us out, with no strings attached. And in this genealogical subculture, we've been inculcated with that sense of duty to go and do likewise.

If you've ever been a recipient of help from someone you've met via an online genealogical forum, you know what I mean. It seemed there was a time when people in genealogy were happy to help each other out—no payment expected. The information we were seeking could often be accessed for free—though admittedly local—but we just had to know where to look, or how to go about seeking it.

Then came those monolithic entities—so big, they had, in one place, everything we were looking for—and they became the game-changers who taught us, once again, to expect to pay for what we were receiving. Yes, they were the smart ones who knew how to aggregate all the material we were seeking, supercharging our research progress with one-stop shopping.

But there was the rub: shopping means reverting from that free economy we'd been privileged to enjoy, back to a means of exchange that demanded the use of money.

Whether you are a strong advocate for one model or the other—say, Ancestry.com rather than FamilySearch.org—you and I and everyone else are left facing a two-sided world. One in which pay-per-view (or per subscription period) co-exists with free-for-all.

In such emergent contingencies, the free economy of I-help-you-who-help-others becomes an antiquated model. We see the rise of the professional—the specialist who sees fit to charge for services rendered, just like the specialists known as bakers or tailors or architects. We pay them; why not pay for our genealogy?

Because we still have one foot in each of two worlds—a free economy and a paying economy—we struggle with this question. That's the bipolar plain upon which we stand when we agonize over how we should proceed with our genealogical culture. That's what fuels such discussions as the one I referred to last month, reflecting on an article posted by another genealogy blogger. We truly are trying to live, simultaneously, in two entirely different worlds. And yet, all pursuing the same passion.

Ironically, the article that starting my musings today asked the question, "Would a Work-Free World Be So Bad?" That question is not a one-off inquiry. One of the experts referred to in this article posed such a question in his own research. In discussing "technological unemployment" he posed this one: "Will life be worth living in a world without work?"

The short of it seems to come down to how to retain a sense of purpose. If your purpose is no longer to get up at oh-dark-thirty to drag yourself through another grueling day at the office, what then becomes your life goal?

Admittedly, this begins to sound much like a world familiar to some long-term genealogy enthusiasts: the world of retirement. Those of us now free to research those micro-history questions burning a hole in our minds know how the passion can propel us through the very hours that others fear would hang heavy on their idle hands.

Perhaps those of us free to pursue genealogy as an avocation are more familiar with the predicaments pondered by such philosophers as the authors of the articles I mentioned above. And more familiar with how to overcome such "problems."

And if we do, as some have predicted will happen at some point in the near future, find ourselves in a culture in which work becomes nearly superfluous as a means for personal support, we genealogists will be handily positioned to provide advice on how to find meaning in life—sans the time-clock that has become the bane of the work world's existence.

   

The Way Things Were

"Long, long ago and in a really distant galaxy..."

So began Dr. Brian Leverich's abbreviated history of how Rootsweb came to be—that 1998 explanation of the pioneering genealogy website that evolved from a world of listservs and file archives and antiquated protocols. If you have never read this significant snapshot of online genealogy's history, get yourself informed. It's well worth the brief moment's read.

I don't know what the connectivity quotient was for the genealogy community, pre-dawn of the computer age. I suppose it is possible that, whilst crawling around on library floors in vain attempts to read illegible call numbers on inconveniently-placed genealogical reference books, there might have been some camaraderie between researchers, but in the age of shushing librarians, I doubt it. It was only after people realized that the utility of computers reached so far beyond the vision of the computer geeks of that decade that the common, everyday genealogy aficionado jumped on board to expand research horizons.

But we did so much more than that, in that pioneering decade in genealogy: we discovered we could talk with each other about our current research projects. We could share our findings. We could haggle with conviction over enigmatic records—or commiserate over the outright missing ones!—with people whom we had never met, face to face.

We had a community—a virtual community—that sprang up around our ability to access each other online. Granted, it was clunky, inelegant and sometimes cumbersome to manipulate, but we found ways to discover, meet and talk with fellow researchers seeking our very own family lines, or checking out the context of local history of the places where our forebears once lived.

The conversations that took place in these email havens, lists and, later, online forums, stretched far beyond the one hundred forty character limit of Twitter, yet couldn't even include visuals—and often concluded with promises of follow-up via the now-disdained "snail mail."

And a funny thing happened in that world during the pre-dawn of Ancestry: we became hard and fast friends with people whom we had never laid eyes on. Ever.

Just last night, since I had been thinking of it ever since deciding to revisit an antiquated project on my fossilized to-do list, I booted up my dinosaur computer—you know, the wood-burning one—and pulled up my history of emails with specific researchers. The virtual memory lane that one task escorted me down was a long one, stretching back to conversations in emails exchanged well over twelve years ago. And that's just the archives captured on that computer. There was yet another computer with as long a legacy going before that one.

Besides the emails, there were mailing lists and message boards. Long before I even knew what I was into, I had found ways to sign up for "lists" from the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania. Someone at each place with just enough computer savvy to do so had set up lists for genealogy fans. It seemed the idea spread like wildfire: if someone could build the mechanism, people would find a way to get to it. There just seems to be something inherent in genealogy that made us want to share our notes, pick each other's brains, and be generous with our resources. What an esprit de corps.

Once groups had figured out ways to format message boards, that decidedly became the place to be to let all this natural proclivity flourish.

Ironic that, as computer capabilities expanded and resources became more sophisticated, the advent of such supercharged researching resources as Ancestry.com—and even free sites like FamilySearch.org—seemed to peak at just the moment when the social aspect of genealogy seemed to decline. It was as if the tools of modern genealogical research, aided and abetted by the organization and efficiency of such companies, reverted genealogy into a solitary pursuit once again.

I hardly engage in those extended email volleys with fellow researchers, concerning a specific family line or historic county, as I had in times past. The extensive analyses that once took place, either one-on-one or in small group communications—the stuff I have archived in my email files from years ago—can hardly compare to the sometimes bland, one-off exchanges that only occasionally waft my way, now. It's been a real education, just unfolding those old messages and reviewing their content. It sets me to pondering just what happened to change the course of collective research progress in a realm that, for a golden moment, seemed the epitome of a promising collaborative future for genealogy.

Bound to Happen Eventually

After all that work on the family tree, adding names of descendants and then entering their spouses names as well—then repeating the process each time we push back another generation—at some point we're bound to run into unexpected connections.

I'm not necessarily thinking of those hey-I'm-related-to-someone-famous moments, right now—think close encounters of a more common variety. It's just that I'm seeing too many coincidental connections to surnames I know from other places, showing up in my family tree.

Take those frustrating DNA test matches. I administer not only the results for my own tests, but for my husband's, as well. Granted, when one is dealing with literally hundreds of surnames, they are bound to start swimming around in our memory, so I can excuse some confusion. But more than once, now, I've been working on my husband's results, and a match pops up for him with surnames from my family tree.

What gives, here? I mean, after all, we couldn't have come up with two more divergent family histories (at least for people living in the same country, that is). His immigrant family settled in Chicago; mine in New York. His DAR-material maternal line came from solid Catholics in colonial Maryland who moved further west through Pennsylvania to central Ohio. Mine was staunchly affiliated with the Old South. Yes, the Great Depression got my family roving the country in search of work, and World War II was the catalyst that got my husband's military family moving not only around this country, but to England and Japan, as well.

And yet, though they never met, my mother finished high school in a city not sixty miles from where my mother-in-law lived.

I watch as I piece together my extended tree—taking care to build it out to show all the descendants of specific ancestors I'm tracing—and see all sorts of potential close encounters of our families. Though my mother-in-law's family was ensconced in Perry County, Ohio, for generations—far, far from my southern family—I end up seeing one branch of my maternal tree move from coastal Virginia to the western side of the state, which then became an entirely different state (West Virginia), from which they then removed to, of all places, Perry County. Oh well, there are coal mines and oil fields in Perry County; maybe it felt just as much "home" as West Virginia had. It makes me wonder how many more generations it would take before parts of my family would intermarry with my husband's.

My husband's DNA tests keep insisting that he is connected to distant cousins sporting the surname Withers. Funny, we have a good friend by that very name. No relation, of course. Or maybe there is. Though he is California born and bred, come to find out his mother has a sister who lived in the very town where my mother's sister lived. Granted, it's a city of forty thousand people, so that shouldn't be surprising...until we realize that it's twenty five hundred miles from here. With chances like that, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that we're fourth cousins or something. I suppose anything is possible—and I'm getting more convinced of it, every day.

It boggles my mind to dwell on the possibility of connections. After all, we have the technology—and, as genealogists, the propensity—to ferret out familial connections. The farther back we can trace our ancestors, the more likely we are to bump into someone—online, at least, if not in person—who is a distant relation. I'm thinking, right now, of a friend in our local genealogical society, who told the story of contacting a Find A Grave volunteer about a memorial he had placed on the website for her great grandmother. When she emailed him to say she'd like to know if he had any more information on the woman, his response was, "Wait! That's my great grandmother! Who are you?"

I've met people online who turned out to be distant cousins, especially on my long-established Taliaferro line. That might seem like a slam-dunk, since there are so many of us out there just waiting to be found, after all these centuries of documentation. But it's not only the facilitation of online communication that helps us find these distant cousins; I met one right here in the city where I live.

Of course, it helps that we are both genealogists, and that is likely the catalyst for making such connections. But I'd also like to consider the possibility that we may see more of this sort of thing happening, as time goes on, for several reasons.

For one thing, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the drifting apart of extended families in modern times and the deepening desire to know more about our roots. While in real life, second cousins may have no knowledge of each other, as they learn how to research their own family history, they start reaching out to each other through online services, connecting and sharing what each one knows to piece together the family's lost saga.

Second, those online services, themselves, become catalysts in connecting distant cousins. Posting trees—whether on the Rootsweb of genealogy's yesteryear, or the free service at FamilySearch.org, or subscriber services such as Ancestry.com—gets the word out there like one giant billboard, advertising our desire for connection with others researching the same family lines. Social media—whether the 1990s style forums or Facebook groups currently in use—help aggregate us by surnames or by place names.

Third, there is such a flurry of information available to inspire newcomers to the field. Television programming brings heart-rending stories—whether about the famous or the commonplace—of finding one's roots, and with the addition of another series in the lineup this season, seems to indicate rising interest in the pursuit. Adoptees in particular have a wealth of volunteer support in encouraging them to attempt finding their birth families, including a new program set to air this spring.

And, of course, advertisements for services like DNA testing get people thinking maybe they can jump into this search, as well.

With all these people taking a long and serious look at their roots, considering their relationships with others, making connections with other researchers, it would not be a surprise to discover relationships we had no idea had existed. It's as if our pedigree charts have pulled a curtain aside to let us see the invisible connections between us.

Even if we can't figure it out yet—and I'm surely among those stuck on the results from my DNA tests—if we keep working at it, we'll likely trace some surprising connections, eventually. You know it's bound to happen.

Above: "View of Gloucester," undated watercolor by British landscape artist Thomas Hearne (1744-1817); courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

For Those Who Change E-Mail Addresses . . . And For Those Who Don't

Don't you love it when you discover something online that leads you to an answer for that burning genealogical question you hadn't been able to solve?

Don't you hate it when that something needs additional explanation or verification—but the person who had provided that first teaser of an answer left contact information that is now out of date?!

In the last week, I've had two occasions to benefit from email contact with another researcher. One, of course, was the hoped-for reply from Cheryl Whistler Garrison, the researcher whose notes—evidently posted no later than 2006—have been helping me muddle through this Ijams-Jackson-Whistler marriage mystery. The other was a surprise email coming to me out of the blue, in response to a forum post I had made, back in 2007. Am I happy I've kept my email address up to date at that old online genealogy resources? What do you think?!

First, let's take a look at what can be added to our continuing research on Sarah Howard Ijams, her marriage to John Jay Jackson, and her mother's second marriage to Captain John Whistler. Cheryl confirmed her resources for the elder Ijams' marriage to the Captain, citing not only the "Yuas" entry digitized on FamilySearch.org, but an additional newspaper entry for the same.

This, as it turned out, was the same entry as had been mentioned in a comment added in 2014 to my old Ijams post from 2012. Elizabeth and John were married in Fairfield County, Ohio, according to an entry in the Eagle, a newspaper of the time, published in Lancaster, Ohio. The newspaper entries had been transcribed and published as part of a collection by the Ohio Genealogical Society, then culled and reprinted in the 1986 edition from Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc., Ohio Source Records.

Always preferring to see the original source—well, in this case, since I won't be traveling to Ohio any time soon, at least the source which had gleaned those original newspaper entries—I Googled the title to see if I could access a copy. Fortunately, it is among the holdings at Ancestry.com—searchable, no less. There, I could see for myself the entry,

MARRIED, 1817...(*Feb. 27).... On Sunday, 2d inst....by Wm. Trimble, Esq., Major John Whisler of U.S.A., Commandant at Ft. Wayne, to Mrs. Elizabeth James, wid. of the late Wm. James, Esq., of Richland twp.

Once again, the newspaper editors—or their transcribers—got it wrong: that should be Captain John Whistler, of course. And the widow's name entered in the county's marriage records as Yuas now re-invents itself as James. That is not unusual, I understand: the surname Ijams has been rendered with a number of different spellings. While I can't vouch for Yuas, I do feel more certain about James.

In her reply to my email, Cheryl was gracious to share more of the content of that letter from the Ijams direct descendant. Among other details was one I had suspected from what I found while flipping through those wonderful War of 1812 pension files: John Whistler had known Elizabeth Ijams previously. But my guess as to a connection at Fort Wayne was not entirely correct: apparently, they knew each other back in Maryland. This tells me I need to examine the military documents for Elizabeth's son William, whose papers stated he was born in Washington County, Maryland. That is very possibly the same location as that of John Whistler, before his enlistment in the United States Army.

According to the scenario painted in Cheryl's email, John and Elizabeth married in 1817, and then when he headed to his new post at Fort Belle Fontaine, Elizabeth brought along her three youngest children. Presumably, one of them was Sarah Howard Ijams, the daughter who eventually married John Jay Jackson, who had also been stationed at Fort Belle Fontaine.

While that seems adequate to settle my mind over those non-stop questions, I do have a few more resources to examine before laying this research challenge to rest. I want to look over the material retrieved from D.A.R., as well as take a peek at the probate records for Elizabeth's first husband, William Ijams. Apparently, the date of death mentioned in William Ijams' Find A Grave entry was somewhat premature. That, however, will save for another day.

Of course, I was elated to have received that response from Cheryl. I was also quite relieved. After all, it's been nearly ten years since she posted her most recent update to her online notes. A lot of changes could have happened since then—including not one, but several email changes. Fortunately for me, that was not the case and we were able to make the connection.

Sometimes, the questions come from the opposite direction—someone has found a genealogical item I've posted online, and decided to email me. Since I've been interacting online in various genealogical venues since there were genealogy forums, I've always tried to keep my email address up to date at those resources.

I'm glad I did. The other day, I received an email from a researcher on another one of my mother-in-law's family lines: this time, it was the Gordons. Just as much as I was pleased that another researcher was able to answer my question sent to an address posted in 2006, I sure was glad I've kept my email addresses updated since that 2007 post I made! Now I'm able to connect with another serious researcher and share what notes we've found.

It hasn't been long since genealogy research has been enabled—supercharged—by handy Internet resources. But time really does fly. For those of us connecting online since the early 1990s, we need to push back from our computers long enough to take a deep breath and realize that's been over twenty years ago! A lot can change over the course of time—especially a stretch of time that long. And we all know how easy it is to change from one email address to another. Or from one service provider to another—along with the obligatory change in email address.

The moral of the story? If you've got any queries posted out there in the ether anywhere, and you hope your investment in posting them will someday pay off, remember to go back and update your email address everywhere you've left those little gems. Your Hansel-and-Gretel breadcrumbs won't be quite the cousin bait you'd hoped, if changing circumstances have gobbled up the email address leading readers from your well-placed posts back to you.

 
   

With a Little Help From Some Friends

Sometimes, it takes a village—of fellow genealogical researchers—to help solve a family history mystery. That's what it was beginning to feel like, when I muddled through the Ryan family in 1900 Walsh County, North Dakota.

Later in life, Edward Ryan and his wife—the former Johanna Tully, sister of my husband's great grandfather, John Tully—had immigrated to what was then the Territory of Dakota. At least, that's what I presume. It was easy to find their one son, James, who was listed in the 1900 census in which the new state of North Dakota made its first appearance. It was also fairly uncomplicated to discover that their other son, Dennis, had already passed away, leaving a wife (Mary) and four children.

Unfortunately—and isn't this always the case when researching the unmarried female relatives in a family—it was not as easy to determine what had become of Edward and Johanna Ryan's two daughters, Margaret and Mary. For one thing, their dates of birth were close: Margaret, born approximately 1858 in Ontario, Canada, was two years older than Mary. The main issue, though, was the difficulty of tracking possible marriages in the face of such common names, coupled with the magnitude of the move from eastern Canada to the territorial outreaches of the western United States.

True, one or both of the sisters could have married and remained in their home in Huron County, Ontario, left behind by their aging parents and older (and, at that point, still unmarried) brothers. Also—though hardly as likely—one or both of them could have remained in Canada as spinsters, while the rest of their family embarked on this wild adventure in a distant locale where the more hands available would help make the work lighter and more successful.

While I can say that it's my hunch that each of them accompanied the rest of the Ryan family in their move westward, I know you'll be hesitant to buy that. Having a "hunch" just doesn't cut it, when it comes to serious genealogical research. We want to see proof.

Sometimes, however, proof is not forthcoming. After all, I'm a denizen of the West Coast of the United States. It's unlikely that I'll just hop a jet and zoom over to Ontario, just to thumb through old marriage records that haven't yet made their appearance online. And I love the thrill of the hunt too much to cave and shell out the bucks to hire a professional to answer those questions for me.

So, I did the next best thing: I turned to my genealogy friends online—those denizens of the genealogy forums which were still in their heyday when I struggled with this research dilemma almost ten years ago. Focusing on the 1906 Canadian census clue I had found in Saskatchewan, in which a William Guinan had reported step-children by the name of Ryan—Chester Ryan, in particular—I went looking for any other researchers working on the same line.

Because I had done some exploratory work on the Guinan line—the surname of that step-dad who had apparently married widow Mary McMartin Ryan in Winnipeg in 1900—I knew some of the other surnames associated with that family. Through a search in an online forum, I found someone from a related line who could answer my questions.

Since I do so much research besides the classic name-date-place documentation of strict genealogical pursuit, over the years, I've assembled pages of records on obituaries, news clippings, and other records on several of the people I've researched. All those find a home in the notes section of my family history database. Dated and cross-referenced with the provider's contact information, each entry helps lead me back to the person who first directed me on any given question I've studied.

In the case of this William Guinan and second wife, Mary McMartin Ryan, I ran into a genealogy forum respondent who happened to have corresponded with someone from another branch known to be part of this family. Now that I look back on her notes, I'm so grateful I saved them, verbatim.

Basically, thanks to this forum contact, I now benefited from the notes of yet another researcher. Here's what the note told me:

Firstly it [the note from the other family researcher] indicates...he [William Guinan] remarried in 1900 to Mary McMartin Ryan "the widow of his brother-in-law" (sorry it didn't say which bro-in-law, but Dennis could be right) who had children of her own. William homesteaded in Sask [Saskatchewan] with 11 people in his household. He died in a car accident near Saskatoon in 1919, and was taken for burial with his first wife in North Dakota by "James Ryan and wife from Winnipeg." William was "survived by his wife, three sons and two dgts."

 
Of course, that fit nicely with the scenario I was beginning to see unfold with the 1900 U.S. census and the November, 1900, marriage record I mentioned yesterday. If you've been absorbing this tangle of names and dates, you'll recognize the name James Ryan as belonging to our Ryan family, being Dennis' only brother.

You will also see this as confirmation that William's first wife—whoever she was—had passed off the scene before his November, 1900, marriage to second wife Mary McMartin Ryan, widow of Dennis Ryan. The email also tells us that that first wife—whoever she was—was buried not in Canada, but back in North Dakota, likely near where the Guinans had formerly lived.

That, of course, brings us full circle back to the 1900 census and its enigmatic write-over, showing William's first wife to be named either Mary or Margaret. One way to resolve that enigma would be to locate death records for any of her children—but, as we'll soon discover, all her children moved with the family to their new home in Canada, making online access to such records not impossible, but a bit trickier.

It would have been helpful if one of those volunteer websites such as Find A Grave had included a listing for William Guinan's thirty-eight-year-old wife, wherever she was buried in North Dakota. Unfortunately, at this point, only three Guinans are listed in the entire state. While they are undoubtedly relatives of William, none was his unfortunate young wife.

There is, however, another interesting point about the quoted portion this forum participant had passed along to me from the other family researcher: the mention that after his passing, William's remains had been taken back to North Dakota to be buried next to his first wife. The sad duties fell to the brother of William's second wife's first husband.

Doesn't that sound a bit convoluted to you? While that is very kind of him, why was it the lot of James Ryan to bury his former sister-in-law's current husband? Besides, as you can tell from the note, James himself had also moved away from North Dakota and was residing, not in Saskatchewan, the current home of the Guinans, but in Winnipeg, in the province of Manitoba. This "favor" to a former in-law was beginning to take him far out of his way.

As you've likely suspected, there was another reason for such a kind-hearted gesture. James' own wife, Annie, was a Guinan, too. While I've yet to determine her relationship to William, it is close (either sibling or first cousin).

However, I'm also positing that there was a second family connection between James Ryan and William Guinan: that that burial next to William's first wife would put him side by side with James' own sister.

I had some hunches about this possibility—but no solid proof. One nice touch was to look at the 1900 census record and realize how nicely the pattern of their children's names fit within the traditional Irish naming pattern. The first daughter—for whom the lot fell to be named after the mother's mother—the given name was Johanna. The second son—in this case, traditionally the namesake of the mother's father—was named Edward.

Short of finding any death record—and granted, with a death as early as 1900, it would be unlikely that any such record would indicate the name of the deceased's parents—I couldn't say for sure that this was the case. However, enclosed with this forum respondent's email was some additional helpful information. In mentioning that William Guinan's first wife had died in 1899 in North Dakota, my helpful forum contact explained:

William Henry Guinan had married twice, first to Mary Ryan (dgt of Edward and Johanna Tully) with whom he had 7 children.

Granted, being provided with this information does not make it so. Witness the many online trees which label William's one and only wife as Mary McMartin Ryan—disregarding the messy detail that their 1900 marriage would preclude her maternal link to his children born before that date, or the fact that he had Ryan stepchildren in his 1906 household. Documentation of these details would be a nice touch.

On the other hand, if William's first wife was indeed a Ryan, that would provide part of the answer to my question about the reason for James Ryan taking such care to deliver William to his final resting place so far from his home. That she was a Ryan named Mary would provide an additional answer—although, having answered the question instigated by that sloppy census enumerator's 1900 write-over, "Mary or Margaret," now launching us on a second quest to determine what had become of the Ryans' other daughter.

At this point, however, it gives me a rough sketch to go on. Barring any further documentation to the contrary, I'll use this as my working premise for the time being. It certainly provides a better fit than the assumption that the post-1900 wife was mother to all the children in both parts of that blended family.