NOT TO BE RUDE, BUT I DON'T CARE
While working on family tree research, I came upon a seemingly congenial 77-year-old man. He appeared to be the bridge to linking his family with my clients. I will call him Mike.
Mike is the father of one daughter, and he also has one granddaughter. His 80-year-old brother, whom my clients knew and suggested that I call, freely offered all the information he had gathered on his family lineage. He then suggested I contact his brother, thinking that he may know more.
Friendly and chatty, Mike’s only sibling informed me that his younger brother had moved from Colorado to New Jersey to be closer to his family in New York. Mike sounded like a swell guy. I may have watched one too many episodes of Dennis the Menace when I was growing up. The menace, Dennis, often said things like, “Gee Mr. Wilson, for a grownup, you’re swell.”
Returning to the research puzzle, I readily called Mike in New Jersey. We played telephone tag for more than a week before finally connecting. To my surprise, he cut to the chase about any family connection he may have to my clients. My anticipation rose when he said he could shorten the amount of time we spend discussing the family.
For a fleeting moment, I thought Mike was about to divulge the relationship. Aside from the same family name, we had already established that he had matching family photos with the people who hired me to do the research. Instead, he blindsided me when he insisted, “It doesn’t matter to me.” Then, he quickly concluded, “Not to be rude, but I don’t really care. We have pictures, and it tells us that we’re cousins.”
Backtracking, while waiting for a reply from my initial call to Mike, in the interim, I posed a question to a genealogy group on Facebook. A woman on the forum responded with documentation, which included information about Mike’s family.
Astonishingly, thirty years prior, an aunt of the woman, a college professor, conducted a study of people in America who also have Mike’s family name. As part of her unpublished research project, the elderly aunt received a letter in the 1990s from a woman named Claire.
The woman in the Facebook group saved the notes her aunt had collected for the project. She was surfing to see if anyone on the internet was interested in the name.
After seeing my post and contacting me, she kindly forwarded the old letter from Claire. Tellingly, it outlined members of the family of my clients, in addition to Mike's.
Although nothing was definitively determined, clues in the letter lean toward the two clans being blood relatives. Due to his disinterest, however, I stopped short of delving into my findings with Mike.
The woman who penned the letter, Claire, would be about 100 now if she is living. In her handwritten letter dated 18 May 1991, she stated, “...I regret to say that we know very little. We never were told much, nor did we ask."
She went on, "We do not know of any older family members, now, who would be able to tell us more. My mother and father died too young for Laura [the granddaughter], who was fascinated by the Russian heritage to ask the questions we should have asked.” It is a wonder whether Mike’s granddaughter will be like Laura.
Not to be rude, but with a bit more discussion and research, the grandfather who moved to New Jersey to be near his granddaughter in New York could have presented her with a complete extended family heritage. In her eyes, her grandfather may have hit the jackpot if he linked her ancestry to a 107-year-young cousin. It is not such a farfetched idea, as her grandfather has a picture of this woman as a child.
Mike’s granddaughter may very well want to know the background of such a special woman tied to her gene pool and their actual connection. Mike’s "cousin" was a child during the women’s suffrage movement. She vividly recalls traveling with her family by horse and wagon the first time her mother had the right to vote. At her ripe age, she writes and corresponds via email. After all these years, this centenarian gleefully lived to see the inauguration of the first female vice-president.
Mike and his granddaughter do not have proof other than one photograph, but they may very well be part of a unique heritage. Generally, the older someone gets, the more interest they have in the past and their family history. A lack of interest from Mike only means that more research is needed to help my clients find the connection between the two families.
Frankly, with all the information shared on the internet these days, it is becoming more feasible to complete family tree puzzles. Maybe it will be as my Uncle Jack suggested when I started researching our family history in 1988, and I'll discover there were horse thieves in the family.