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June 14, 2006
More Blog-Mediated Serendipity
Here's another serendipitous occurrence, mediated by this blog. About a week ago, my wife received an e-mail from a woman in Anchorage, Alaska who was doing genealogy on our family name. She found us (and me) because of my blog post last September, when I wrote a piece in honor of my father's 85th birthday. After finding his name, she shook the family tree a bit and wrote to find out if we might have a common ancestor -- a fellow who purportedly came to the U.S. in 1752, hired by the British as a mercenary to fight those colonial upstarts (Oh, the shame of it!). His home appears to have been Heerte, Braunschweig, Germany (rather than somewhere in the Netherlands). Anyway, after a number of rapid-fire e-mails, Family Tree Maker determined that my Anchorage correspondent and I are 5th cousins. Amazing!
We are leaving tomorrow for a family wedding in Boston, and I'll be talking to as many people as I can about our family history. The new discovery of my 5th cousin probably would not have happened had I not been writing in this blog. So, to follow up on the question I posed earlier about whether I should continue blogging, the answer for now is ... definitely yes. It's been a source of satisfaction and new discoveries and an outlet for reflections I probably wouldn't have uttered outside the space of my own brain. So stay tuned for *Inner Geek - year 2* ...
Posted by hgroteva at June 14, 2006 09:07 PM | About Inner Geek | Life | Technology
Comments
Very interesting, my neighbor has done family research and found every body back to the 16th century.
All with the help of the internet.
/pat
Posted by: Patrick at April 21, 2007 09:47 AM
I think this is a great resource. Came across you guys while looking for research blggs in google, read a bit and found out this site rocks. If any of you guys need more main-stream reseach or background public records etc.... http://42fy.com. Keep up the awesome work here.
Posted by: darius Harris at July 2, 2007 03:30 PM