Living-relative Connections: Follow-up

Many people have expressed to me that I should keep them updated on my attempts to resolve some family rifts, as I stated in my January 9, 2008 post Living-relative Connections. I do have some information but the process has not yet run its course - nor did I have expectations that it would be completed in a matter of days or even weeks.

I tried to contact my brother with whom I've not had contact for the past three years. The problem is, short of hiring a private investigator, I don't have any contact information nor can I find any. I have a pretty good reputation among friends as being the "Harriet The Spy of The Internet" in that I can usually find anyone or anything in a short amount of time while web-surfing.

However, I'm pretty sure that my brother is intentionally covering his tracks, not so much so that I or other family can't contact him but for a far more damaging and selfish reason: he has not been keeping up with child support payments for several years. Obviously he didn't learn any of the lessons that I did growing up and how our own father fled to another state strictly to avoid child support payments. I'll get off my soap box on this issue but I'm sure many of you have the same "cads" on your family tree.

As for contacting my father, for whom I do have contact information, I am holding off for now - thanks to many of the kind comments and emails from my earlier post. I really do need to sort out the "why" rather than the "how" of making contact. I want to thank Terry Thornton over at Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippi for his post about A Man's Journey To Simple Abundance. Namely, the prompt to list Ten Things I Wished I'd Said To My Father. I've been putting this one off for the longest time but I think I need to work through the list in order to realize whether or not contacting my father would be fruitful.

Now for good news. In most of my fellow genea-bloggers' posts on making living-relative connections, the contact was initated by the blogger. This weekend, I was able to be on the receiving end of contact! My first cousin Lisa in Spokane, Washington, who is the daughter of my father's brother John MacEntee, sent me an email asking if I was related to the "New York MacEntee's." Well, my surname is not a very common one and often it is mangled into McGinity, McEntee, McIntire, etc.

Our emails progressed to each of us creating a Facebook profile and sending more emails. We confirmed that we are related and she caught me up on some info for my database such as birthdates, names of children etc. We are slated to talk on the phone later today which should be fun.

As usual, I will keep my genea-friends posted. Cheers!