What should I divulge?

Before going to an airline (now defunct) reunion this weekend, I checked my airline’s website for messages. There was one from a person who was studying his genealogy and inquired about a cousin (one of those removed-type cousins), a flight attendant who died in a crash. He knew very little about her and wanted personal as well as anecdotal information. I remembered this young woman because she was the senior flight attendant on my very first flight.

At the reunion I discovered the following: she was in her mid-twenties when she died, had a 3 or 4 year old son at the time, was from Chicago, had been a waitress there, and lived with one of our captains at the time she died.

Her death happened during the '60s; the captain died in the early '90s.

I had no indication that the researcher knew about the son. Does it do any good to let him know about the son and the captain? If you were researching your family tree would you want to know this stuff? What on earth happened to the son and could he be researching the same?

If I were doing the research, I would appreciate knowing this just to complete the family tree. On the other, the captain might have had a family life after her death and it may not be right to potentially burden them with questions about her. And the son?

What would you do?

I think the researcher would definitely want to know. Do you have any way of contacting the Captain’s family or the son? If you do, you could ask them if they mind you passing information on to the researcher - doesn’t seem to be much point in trying to second-guess whether they’d be interested in the project or feel their privacy was being invaded, so it looks like the best course of action is to leave the decision up to them.