Another Facebook success story

When I was a girl, I was always told that my dad’s family, on his dad’s side, consisted just of my grandpa and his two brothers, one of whom had moved to England and had two sons, and then my dad and his brother, and me and my sister and my cousin. Later, we learned that my dad had an older half-brother, with a wife and three kids, and our family thus nearly doubled. When my grandpa became ill, in his 80s, I wanted to feel reconnected with him though I was living in a different state, so I wrote off to Kansas to get information about his family, to try to trace it back a few more generations. To my delight, a woman at one of the county historical societies connected me with my grandpa’s elderly but lively cousin Becky, who had collected many pages of information about a whole extended family to which I belonged. I then expanded on her work by tracing the family back to Europe, and updating some of the later stuff, and in 1990 I put it into booklet form.

These days, thanks to FB, I’m now in regular contact not only with my half-uncle’s family, but with the formerly English family members as well. On Saturday, the wife (J.) of one of the English brothers and I spent some time trying to look up new information on old ancestors, and I ended up digging out the 1990 booklet. When I looked inside, I was reminded that the two English cousins had an older half-sister, which I mentioned to J. She immediately took on this new project with considerable vigor, and within an hour and a half had found her sister-in-law’s yearbook photo, then her marriage information, and eventually even her FB page. She sent off a message, and soon heard back. Our cousin was very excited to be “found”! She’d put some effort into locating her brothers, but with no success, and now her family, too, is much, much bigger. Go Facebook.