A Cousin Bonanza

Recently I became aware that there was a new person, Joy, attending our church. I encountered her for the first time when she had been speaking to one of our grandsons during children’s church and I was told that she was a recently retired woman who had been a missionary to China and Thailand. That was intriguing to me as I’ve been to both of those countries several times. That same Sunday someone mentioned to me that they had parked next to a vehicle in the parking lot where the rear gate was ajar and had closed it and that the vehicle had Vermont license plates. I wondered if the vehicle and the lady went together.

A few days later I decided to do some investigation to see if I was correct. I first tried to see if she had a Facebook account and quickly found her. It confirmed that she was from Vermont, that she had been in China the past several years and that she had Facebook friends there as well as in Thailand. It also listed the town she was from in Vermont.

Because of the “Bethel Web” project that I have been working on (*1), I thought that I would do a quick genealogy check on her to see if she was connected. Since I have long roots in New England (especially Connecticut and Massachusetts), I wondered if she was a distant cousin of mine.

My first stop, which I rely on when investigating living individuals, was to see if I could find an online obituary with her name in it that would give the names of any of her ancestors. I fairly quickly found a recent obituary for her aunt (her father’s sister). It gave the names of Joy’s father’s parents and also indicated that Joy’s father was deceased. This is the break I look for, as a person’s grandparents were usually born before 1940 and so could be found in census records.

But I was also fortunate in that Vermont is one of the few states that has marriage and divorce records available online. With the full name of Joy’s father, I was then able to get the name of her mother as well. But I was really enthralled (is that too strong a word for what we genealogists feel?) when I found that her mother’s maiden name was Blakeslee. That is a surname that occurs in my own family line several times and has ties back to the original Blakeslee who came to New Haven, CT. I was very motivated to continue my search!

After a few hours with my fingers dancing across the keyboard, following genealogical hints, looking for consistencies in dates and places, I had a reasonable outline of Joy’s family tree. The first match to my own was of course up the Blakeslee path, but since that line went back to Connecticut by the early 1800’s, I had nearly 200 years of Joy’s ancestors living in the same place, New Haven, as mine and I was soon finding connections on many different branches of her rapidly developing family tree. After finding about a half-dozen common ancestors, I decided that I had to meet this new cousin and share our connections.

I sent her a friend request via Facebook and shared that I wanted to meet her. Her response was “Interesting that we might be related. I don’t encounter cousins very often.” When I asked about the Blakeslee line she then replied, “I’d love to learn more about the Blakeslee line. My Grandfather Blakeslee broke ties with most of his family, and I never heard about even his immediate family.” Then she further shared, “For Christmas this year, I’m planning to give my nieces and nephews gifts from my grandparents, including info and copies of photos. I have nothing to share about G. Blakeslee’s family. Perhaps your help is just what I need. You are a godsend!”

That was just the motivation I needed to continue my research into her family tree and to concentrate on completing as much of her Blakeslee line as possible. The following Sunday, I introduced myself to her in church and we set up a time for my wife and I to meet her for dinner later that week. In the meantime, I spent several more hours researching as many of her family lines as I could so that I could show her the rich family information about her ancestors and all her connections to me. I prepared a printout of her Blakeslee family line going back to the 1600s which we gave to her that evening and which I also emailed to her so she could share with other family members.

Thus far, I have documented the following common ancestors in Joy’s family tree and mine (I’m listing only the men here, but their wives are obviously also common ancestors):

·       Francis Russell (1558-1613) this one is actually on her father’s side

·       Joseph Loomis (1590-1658) also on her father’s side

·       John Blakeslee (1651-1712)

·       William Chatterton (1640-1700)

·       Thomas Curtis (1648-1736)

·       William Tuttle (1607-1673)

·       Matthew Gilbert (1619-1680)

·       Joseph Dorman (1669-1712)

·       William Wooding (1625-1684)

·       Daniel Sperry (1665-1750)

·       William Wilmoth (1624-1687)

·       Joseph Ives (1674-1755)

·       John Roote (1608-1684)

·       Richard Vore (1600-1683)

·       Thomas Sherwood (1586-1655) two ways

·       John Welton (1633-1726)

·       John Carrington (1640-1690)

·       Thomas Dibble (1613-1700) four ways

·       Dennis Crampton (1636-1689)

·       William Buell (1605-1681) three ways

·       John Hull (1640-1711)

·       Nathaniel Merrill (1601-1653)

That’s over two dozen ways in which we are connected, mostly at the 8^th/9^th/10^th cousin levels. And there are probably others that I’ve yet to discover as I complete some of the other branches of Joy’s family tree. I’ve never encountered a similar situation in which I share so many common ancestors with someone!

At our dinner meeting with Joy she shared that when she made the decision to retire to the Lehigh Valley she did not believe that she knew anyone in this area. But fate brought her here and even led her to our church where she had the chance encounter with this crazy genealogist who happened to be working on a project to connect the individuals in the church to each other and who was intrigued by the Vermont license plates.  She will now have a lot to share with all her relatives back in Vermont about the part of the family that they knew nothing about and which they now have more thoroughly documented than they ever dreamed of.

Not only do I get to exercise my genealogical investigation skills, but I now have a new cousin who I get to see each week at church. And Joy now has a connection in the area and will no longer feel so isolated from any relatives.

Notes:

*1 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-bethel-web.html