An aunt of mine is heavily involved with genealogy, and has met several people online who are second cousins and beyond. I have yet to really meet them, because I am not sure what to make of the idea.
Growing up, “family” to me meant ONLY my four grandparents and everyone who traced themselves to them…my aunts, uncles and their children, my first cousins. I have run into a couple of second cousins before, but most of our encounters were simply long discussions about exactly how we were related (“Are you my second cousin once removed…or maybe my third cousin once removed…”), they were just not really ‘family’ . And these people my aunt has become acquainted with are really just strangers to me. I am not sure what to make of them. Are we supposed to get along like family just because we share 1/8th or 1/16th of our genes? Or can we just be friends that happen to share a relatively recent ancestor or two.
I suppose this is one of the social phenomena of the internet age, but it doesn’t seem to be commented on much. I am sure there are many people out there who are finding lost or distant kin online right?
Sadly, I very recently was “found” online by a relative I cut off all relations with nearly 15 years ago. I have refused to respond to their attempts at contact, due to painful family matters.
My dad found a whole bunch of them on the other side of the country. We’ve visited a few times. Meeting family like you meet friends could work out to be uncomfortable, or you maybe you just don’t click. But didn’t turn out weird at all. We got along like family, and it turned out great.
I found a man looking for his father’s biological sister whom he had never met but always knew of. The man is my cousin and his father is my mother’s brother. My grandmother had given him up for adoption at birth after my grandfather was injured in an accident and had to be permanently hospitalized.
We net them this past summer, it was exciting but also upsetting to my grandmother at first. My grandmother had never told anyone about it. My mother at the age of 70 found out she has a 67 year old brother.
Yes. My mom stumbled across a cousin my grandmother grew up with. Finding her added thousands of names to our database and we had a wonderful time when she drove up for the family reunion
I have a very unusual last name, but when I started working at my present job five years ago, I was surprised to learn that there was another person with the same name. With the help of an exhaustive genealogy of the family that was published in stages, between 20 and 10 years ago, I was able to determine that he was a distant cousin. We communicated by email, so, yeah, you could say we met online.
I was emailed by someone with my unusual last name. His grandfather grew up in a shtetl (small Jewish village) about 10 miles away from where my great-grandfather grew up. My grandfather has told me that his father (my great-grandfather) moved from this other shtetl as a boy, so we figure there is some relation there. With Jewish genealogy, it becomes extremely difficult given the population flux and turnover of the last century.
It was amazing. The editor of a journal I know sent me an email asking me to translate an article from Italian, written by a professor in Italy. Turned out he had exactly the same name as me (except that his first name took the Italian form while mine is the English version of the same name). We started emailing each other and found that his parents and my grandparents had come from the same province of Sicily, so we welcomed each other as long-lost cugini.
Not online, but through a magazine article. My cousin and I really clicked and became closer than siblings. Maybe this is rare, because a distant “aunt” (by her marriage only) contacted me, and I cannot stand the woman.
In the 1920s, his grandparents split up, his grandfather disappeared, and then his grandmother died at age 35, leaving four children. Her family split up the children (ostensibly to keep Grandpa E. from finding them; nobody would talk about it) and they were all raised separately. Mr. S’s dad was bitter about that his whole life.
Anyway, Grandpa E. was the family’s Jimmy Hoffa. There were rumors and suppositions about what happened to him – until a few years ago, when Mr. S’s cousin and a Canadian woman met through their genealogy research and discovered that they shared a grandfather – Grandpa E. Turned out he had gone to Canada, married and had a whole other family. He died in 1964. There was still one surviving son from that marriage who had just turned 70, and Mr. S’s youngest uncle was still alive at 75.
The weekend after 9/11/01 :eek: we drove 75-year-old Uncle L up into Canada to meet his 70-year-old half-brother for the first time. It was pretty amazing to be there, and to see photographs of the grandfather in his later years whom we had only seen in pictures as a young man. The Canadian relatives marveled at how much Uncle L looked like Grandpa at the same age. And we finally got to lay flowers on Grandpa’s grave.
We would still like to go out West and visit the rest of the new family. They were lovely people.
Oh, and the Canadian uncle was very happy to learn that his name would not die out – there were no boys born to that family in the second generation, but our branch has boys galore.
I have an extremely uncommon last name; complicated further by an unusual spelling of that last name. Every so often I search on it to see where “I” show up.
Lo and behold I find a site in Germany with my name all over it, along with a bunch of known ancestors.
Turns out a fellow who shares a great-great grandfather with me is doing a ton of ancestral research. He’d contacted my uncle in Germany and got more info; hence the info on my more recent ancestors.
I contacted him and he gave me so much info on the family, even back to the 1600s. He sent me an FTW file of all his research; I went out and bought Family Tree to make use of it. I wound up sending him some photos to round out his research.
I hope to meet him in person one day; for now we exchange email pleasantries!
I was looking for information online about the Tillotson side of the family (my father’s mother’s line). I have a genealogy that goes back to 1245, so I thought that there might be something out there. I thought at least I’d find something on John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury. I found a site that was basically my mimeographed copy of the genealogy online, but much easier to read and with photots. Turns out that we are both descended from this guy (1758-1848). He served in the Continental Army for just over a month in the summer of 1779.
I contacted the author, who told me how far back we were related. I sent him some information on recent deaths in the Tillotson line, which he posted on his site.
I have a fairly uncommon surname too. That must be the key. I pity anyone coming from a long line of James Smiths trying to trace their family tree online.
I met a distantly-related cousin via the Internet; we merely chatted a little a few times, nothing long-term. Assuming I recall correctly, my great-great paternal grandparents were also his great-great-great grandparents - yet he’s slightly older than I am. (My father was born rather late in life to his parents, so that’s probably part of where the generation gap occurred.)
I’m not involved in geneology. I have an unusual surname, and he shares it. He happened to run across it somewhere and sent me an E-mail asking about my ancestry.
During the first few months of being online, my interest in genealogy led me to several distant, previously unknown, relatives.
One relative had a copy of a Mexican War pension request on our common ancestor and also had a photo of my dad and uncle when they were very young. That family didn’t know why their parents had retained the photo–the back had their names and town but it meant nothing to them until I made contact.
My various contacts were a thrill to me and to them.
I also unforetunately reconnected two of my relatives who didn’t want to be reconnected!
Happy to see other genealogy addicts…oops…enthusiasts on the board. I meet distant cousins all the time in my research. The most rewarding encounter was one that resulted in my information reuniting an adopted woman with her biological parents. She went from having no history to having an extensive family tree going back about 12 generations.
