Part

one of two

I'd like to

introduce to you a man I never knew, a stranger who

became a cousin - too late to cherish.

Those of us

who dabble in family history - and we are legion

- marvel regularly at what the Internet has done for

our research. Not only are more and more records

accessible at the click of a mouse, but we can with

incredible speed find out who else is working on our

lines anywhere in the world.

Stories

like one in a recent RootsWeb newsletter are commonplace.

An American stationed in Saudi Arabia heard from a woman

whose Canadian cousin had recognized some of his names

and put him in touch with relatives in England. Another

wrote that a woman in Tasmania connected him with

possible kin, �migr�s to Australia from Lagen,

Macedonia in the 1930s.

When the

researcher went to New Zealand on business, he made the

trip to Melbourne and was greeted by an 82-year-old

distant cousin and "a whole community of immigrants

from Lagen [who] greeted me with delicious spinach

dumplings and some foul beverage, and told me stories of

Lagen, and of the town before that that was burned by the

Turks, and what a little devil my grandfather had been,

and how many new cousins I had now acquired on the bottom

side of the Earth."

My

experience has not been quite that exotic, although I've

worked one line back to a 14th-century knight in

Switzerland. To me, the wonder of Internet genealogy is

the generosity of the researching community. Sure,

there's pragmatism at work here: After all, if you share

what you know, chances are your correspondent will too

and you'll both have information you didn't have before.

But

pragmatism does not entirely explain the kindness of

strangers who will almost certainly never meet, or the

bonds that can bridge a continent. I've had people make

copies and refuse reimbursement for hefty postage fees to

send me an ancestor's will, baptismal records, old

photographs.

One of my

most promising leads appeared on my computer screen one

morning because a woman took the trouble to transcribe

several pages from a book she had that is no longer in

print. She was one of perhaps a dozen people I'd e-mailed

on a list of folks working on lines possibly related to

mine. She knew I'd have a hard time finding that

information on my own, so she sat down and copied

material and references that brought me very close to one

of my most elusive ancestors.

But back to

my too-late cousin. A gentleman named Donald Spidell

posted a query about a name I happened to have in my

database, Wunderlich. I sent him what little information

I had, and asked him for anything he had on my Wise

family, into which a Wunderlich had married. When he

wrote back, his salutation startled me: "Hello,

cousin!"

He

explained: "If you are related to these people, then

we are cousins," adding a little joke: "Note

that I am descended from a marriage of a Wise and a

Wunderlich. I like to say that I am descended from the

Wise and the Wonderful."

He sent me

lots of valuable, well-documented information and I was

able to reciprocate because I had researched original

material in the Pennsylvania county where these ancestors

had lived. And he referred other researchers to me when

he thought it would be helpful to me or to them,

introducing me as his cousin. (That felt a bit odd; to

me, cousins were the children of aunts and uncles whom I

didn't know very well but shared genes with. It was hard

to grasp that this stranger from Arizona was similarly

related.)

One of his

letters closed: "Sorry I was so late answering your

letter. But you just don't know the last three months

which I have had. If you like, I can send you a long,

newsy letter about building and moving into a new home,

rolling my wife's Jeep Cherokee down the median of the

Interstate, and an encounter with a 5 1/2 foot long

rattlesnake. Don."

It was

tantalizing, but I didn't press him for his story. I wish

now I had. We continued with a few more exchanges until

mid-1998 when I think we both decided we had exhausted

each other's resources.

Last year I

acquired another instant family member in the same way, a

woman named Gloria who had seen a posting of mine and

wrote to ask about one of my names. As our correspondence

expanded, I referred her to Don, assuring her that he was

a very pleasant person and would certainly help her if he

could. She sent me a copy of her letter to him, about a

name she'd been working on for 23 years without success.

"Like

everyone when you hit a brick wall," she wrote,

"you work on all the other lines and then one day

you meet someone who in passing knows someone else who

has done some research on the same brick wall."

Neither of

us could have guessed the reply she would receive. It

came from Beth Spidell. Don was dead.

To be

continued...

<!--##############