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!

The Box - Part 2

Well I last wrote about The Box in December after I had finished cleaning out most of my mother's house in Liberty, New York. I made a second pass at it today and feel that there's been some real progress.

I went through and selected photos that I need to scan for the genealogy database. Most of these are photos that were taken from 1905 through 1930, although there are many recent photos and some in between.

The challenge is what do you do with:

- photos that have no date or no names on the back (or front) and you can't identify any of the subjects?

- photos that have names scrawled all over the subjects' faces? Unfortunately as my great-grandmother Therese McGinnes Austin got older, she decided this was the best way to identify the people in the photos for the next generations.

- duplicate photos? How many photos can I have of one person especially in similar poses or outfits?

You just have to be ruthless sometimes and remove your emotions from the process. I really don't have anyone in the family that is interested in the photos let alone the genealogy info.

So I've decided to select the photos that are great quality, most representative of the person or time and place, and can be easily scanned. One example is the photo above - it is my grandfather on my mother's side. His name was Alfred Joseph Austin, 1917 - 1984. The photo was taken in 1922.

A Hunch, A Letter and An Answer

Well I decided to do something that I've never done in terms of my genealogy research: I sent a letter to a stranger who I was pretty certain was my 2nd cousin once removed. Although I had a phone number I didn't want to just call up and sound like some nut case or some scammer. Here is how it all transcended:

In doing research on the McCrickert branch of my family, I noticed that two sisters were very close but all I had on the other siblings (two brothers and one sister) was the death of Matthew McCrickert in a military plane accident in 1946 (see photo above and the subject of a future post). Something told me that there may have been a rift in the past and that I could still get details for the one brother and sister. The sister's name was Dulcide Veronica McCrickert - not a very common first name so I had that to work with.

I came across an obiturary and a listing in the Social Security Death Index for a Dulcide V. ******* who passed away in 2006. I was able to find living relatives mentioned in the obituary and through current public records placing them in Long Island, NY. I was pretty certain that this person was the son of Dulcide V. McCrickert so I decided to write a letter and enclose some supporting evidence.

I wanted to appear sincere and I didn't want to come across as some scammer. So I printed out some very simply ancestor and descendant charts for Dulcide V. McCrickert and sent them along with a simple letter. I included my email and phone number in case the son wanted to contact me.

While I waited a few weeks, I kept thinking about this: my aunt Ethel McCrickert Hannan, the sister of Dulcide, lived with my mother from 1998 to 2002 when she passed away. Dulcide did not pass until 2006. My aunt Ethel never did talk much about Dulcide - I just feel sorry that there was an opportunity to be in contact with other McCrickert relatives but was unaware. I could easily fault myself for not having researched this earlier, but that is water under the bridge.

What it does remind me to say is this: if you have the opportunity to contact elderly relatives please do so NOW - tape record interviews, have them label the backs of photographs etc. I can't emphasize this enough.

As for the answer to my inquiry: I'll save that for the next post.

The Box

Well, I started on The Box this afternoon - this was after I had a huge lunch of Japanese food with my former neighbor Erica who happened to be in my new neighborhood. So, rather than be lazy and lethargic I thought I'd tackle The Box.

This is something I've dreaded for months. The Box is a large file box filled with pictures, letters, mementos which I compiled during the past year while cleaning out my mother's house. Part of the dread comes from the emotions that naturally overtake me as I go through all this stuff. One emotion is a feeling of being overwhelmed - there are so many items and every one is important, if not to me, to someone in the family. Another emotion is responsibility - as the keeper of these items I need to make sure they are taken care of, scanned, loaded into the database to share with everyone. Another emotion is sadness - when I see pictures of Mom in her heyday, or pictures of her with her siblings. And finally, the greatest emotion is love - I have a family heritage which goes back many generations and those before me have taken care to save items, to document them, and to pass them on.

So far, I've organized all the memorial cards which were given out at various funerals - I will be scanning these soon and placing them here.