Family

Today, I had the opportunity of working on my family history. I had sent an email last night to a cousin in Vancouver asking about some information that he might have. Well, Jim answered the email and sent me information as well as an obituary about the person that I was asking about.

I sorted through the information and was able to make sense of most of it. After I had entered it into my tree, some more information came to the surface. I use websites that have an automatic search function. This function does about 80% of the work when the information is on their website. This function can only sort through the information and records that the website has available. Not all information that is needed is on websites or is not yet digitized. It costs money to digitize records, but, fortunately, there are people that do the work needed.

Anyway, there was a bit of the information that he sent that did not fit easily into place. As it turned out, this information was on the tree of another cousin. This cousin lives in Rainy River, and we have been in touch previously. It just didn’t sink in which part of the tree was the one that she belonged to. I found out today.

We have just spent about an hour and a half, getting to know each other. I also took the time to sort out those hard-to-fit pieces of the puzzle and can now put it to bed (so to speak). I also asked for more information concerning the family and she was quite happy to give me the information. I found out that she is about a year and a half older than me and that her brother is about three quarters of a year older than me as well.

We plan to stay in touch as we are family, albeit distant family. My husband has been told that if we were to travel west in Canada, we will be stopping to visit.

I have found that when you research your family history, you have a marvelous opportunity to meet family members that have drifted away. This drift is not always intended and, sometimes, you think that there are not many members of the family.

Family history will help you to discover your living family as well as those who have gone on before you. It helps you to rebuild the ties that should never have been severed. It can make your family stronger. Once you discover how large your family actually is, and you may never know the full extent of the family, it’s up to you what you do with the information. It can be a very joyous trip.

On the other hand, you might dig up some information that some members of the family do not appreciate. Just remember, your ancestors were people too. They made their mistakes just as we make our mistakes. Life can be very rewarding even with the mistakes that are made. After enough time, we should be able to look back and say, “Yes, I made a mistake, and it was a bad one. But I learned from it.” Or “Yes, I made a mistake, and I thought that it was a bad one, but I survived and am trying to do better.”

Live life. Love your family. Look for the missing members of the family that should be there. Work together. Have fun. Support one another. If you don’t have your family, you don’t have one of the most important things in life.