Last week three family members contacted me about genealogy. My aunt from the Eckhardt side wrote a lovely note on a gorgeous card, thanking me for all the research I’ve been doing. “We have been very lacking in such information!” she said.
Then my cousin Tim – a Granger connection – sent a message via my website. He wanted to alert me to a newly-translated book about a couple of Hungarian adventurers who rode motorcycles around the world during the ’20s and ’30s. I hear from Tim periodically since the time we met in 2004, after our mutual cousin Susan found me on an online genealogy forum during my research for Strength Within: The Granger Chronicles. Susan initiated the connection by sending me a message saying, “I think we may be cousins.”
Last week, a “new” cousin Jim contacted me via email. He had stumbled upon this blog and found that we are both researching the Wilcox family and that we are even further connected via the Eckhardt line. It’s always a delight to find someone in the family who’s as passionate as I am about all this! Of course Jim and I have each taken a slightly different tack on digging for the ancestors, and by sharing, we both gain new resources and insights.
One of the biggest thrills of genealogy research is making connections. Connections to ancestors, to past ways of life, to ancestral countries and cultures… and also to people in the family, some you know and some you get to “meet”, often thanks to online connections.
The internet: it’s much more than a genealogical tool for data collection!
I know – I cannot imagine how anyone, ever, did extensive family tree research before the Internet. I guess they went to city halls and libraries…and wrote to faraway clerks in faraway countries…and interviewed all the elders in their families…and even then, it’d be hit or miss. Now there’s so much information online – genealogy is a much more reasonable hobby! Pre-internet family free research was kind of like being an early Canadian pioneer, I guess :).