By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

Part one of two

I'd like to introduce to you a man I never knew, a stranger who became a cousin — too late to cherish.

Those of us who dabble in family history — and we are legion — marvel regularly at what the Internet has done for our research. Not only are more and more records accessible at the click of a mouse, but we can with incredible speed find out who else is working on our lines anywhere in the world.

Stories like one in a recent RootsWeb newsletter are commonplace. An American stationed in Saudi Arabia heard from a woman whose Canadian cousin had recognized some of his names and put him in touch with relatives in England. Another wrote that a woman in Tasmania connected him with possible kin, »migr»s to Australia from Lagen, Macedonia in the 1930s.

When the researcher went to New Zealand on business, he made the trip to Melbourne and was greeted by an 82-year-old distant cousin and “a whole community of immigrants from Lagen [who] greeted me with delicious spinach dumplings and some foul beverage, and told me stories of Lagen, and of the town before that that was burned by the Turks, and what a little devil my grandfather had been, and how many new cousins I had now acquired on the bottom side of the Earth.”

My experience has not been quite that exotic, although I've worked one line back to a 14th-century knight in Switzerland. To me, the wonder of Internet genealogy is the generosity of the researching community. Sure, there's pragmatism at work here: After all, if you share what you know, chances are your correspondent will too and you'll both have information you didn't have before.

But pragmatism does not entirely explain the kindness of strangers who will almost certainly never meet, or the bonds that can bridge a continent. I've had people make copies and refuse reimbursement for hefty postage fees to send me an ancestor's will, baptismal records, old photographs.

One of my most promising leads appeared on my computer screen one morning because a woman took the trouble to transcribe several pages from a book she had that is no longer in print. She was one of perhaps a dozen people I'd e-mailed on a list of folks working on lines possibly related to mine. She knew I'd have a hard time finding that information on my own, so she sat down and copied material and references that brought me very close to one of my most elusive ancestors.

But back to my too-late cousin. A gentleman named Donald Spidell posted a query about a name I happened to have in my database, Wunderlich. I sent him what little information I had, and asked him for anything he had on my Wise family, into which a Wunderlich had married. When he wrote back, his salutation startled me: “Hello, cousin!”

He explained: “If you are related to these people, then we are cousins,” adding a little joke: “Note that I am descended from a marriage of a Wise and a Wunderlich. I like to say that I am descended from the Wise and the Wonderful.”

He sent me lots of valuable, well-documented information and I was able to reciprocate because I had researched original material in the Pennsylvania county where these ancestors had lived. And he referred other researchers to me when he thought it would be helpful to me or to them, introducing me as his cousin. (That felt a bit odd; to me, cousins were the children of aunts and uncles whom I didn't know very well but shared genes with. It was hard to grasp that this stranger from Arizona was similarly related.)

One of his letters closed: “Sorry I was so late answering your letter. But you just don't know the last three months which I have had. If you like, I can send you a long, newsy letter about building and moving into a new home, rolling my wife's Jeep Cherokee down the median of the Interstate, and an encounter with a 5 1/2 foot long rattlesnake. Don.”

It was tantalizing, but I didn't press him for his story. I wish now I had. We continued with a few more exchanges until mid-1998 when I think we both decided we had exhausted each other's resources.

Last year I acquired another instant family member in the same way, a woman named Gloria who had seen a posting of mine and wrote to ask about one of my names. As our correspondence expanded, I referred her to Don, assuring her that he was a very pleasant person and would certainly help her if he could. She sent me a copy of her letter to him, about a name she'd been working on for 23 years without success.

“Like everyone when you hit a brick wall,” she wrote, “you work on all the other lines and then one day you meet someone who in passing knows someone else who has done some research on the same brick wall.”

Neither of us could have guessed the reply she would receive. It came from Beth Spidell. Don was dead.

To be continued...

Back to the Top of the PageBack to the Weekend Home Page