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Improving on the Family Tree


Have you ever wanted to identify someone in an old photograph that was in your family and thought you would never do it? Maybe you should read my own good luck story.

I had collected from all relations I could find copies of old photographs that were apart of my family tree. I have spent time trying to have the unknown identified by elderly relatives. Some I could figure out some by looking at genealogical records.

I recently came in contact with a women who was helping a distant cousin of mine, I have never met, with his family history. How I found this person was through a website that displayed a correction to a birth record that I was viewing for my own research.

I email this person an asked how they knew to correct this misinformation on the website. The lady answered me by letting me know she knew a person in the family. I continued to ask how that person she knew was related.

What I found out next was very interesting. This individual had a common ancestor with me. She told me that he never knew his mother because she die when he was an infant. I travelled his branch of our common tree and realized my own mother must have known of him. He was a cousin of hers.

I call my mother and talked to her about our family history. What she told me was she did see this cousin of hers when he was an infant before his mother died. After that she did not know what became of him.

Know that I had confirmation that he was the relative on my mother's mother's side of the family I wanted to see if I had any old family photographs he could have copies of.

Yes! I did have a few. And the ones I had were the same old photographs that no one could help me identify the young children in.  I was able to now identify the children with my own grandfather in uniform during WW1. My grandfather was visiting his aunt when they were taken in 1918. The information on the ages of the children born after 1911 was given to me by this distance cousins friend. My mother could only name them but not identify the individuals because she was born many years later.

My distant cousin now has photographs taken in 1918 of his mothers family of aunts, uncles and his mother as a baby, grandfather, grandmother and great grandparents. How wonderful it is to be equipped with the knowledge and proof of ones own heritage and to pass it on to a relative you never met.

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