Don’t Give Up!
You hear about it all the time. Genealogists hitting a brick wall and not being able to locate that one ancestor who could create a breakthrough. That was the case in our research of the McDonnell family. My husband, Tom McDonnell, was quite disheartened (bummed out really) that he couldn’t find much online about his family. He found the ship’s manifest from the second of the multiple times that his paternal grandfather came from Europe to America on the Ellis Island website, but he couldn’t find any records in the archives at the Mormon website for any family members.
Tom had a family tree that was hand-drawn by his first cousin once removed going back to his gg grandfather of the Irish family and another one drawn by Tom’s father of his grandfather’s family in America. It had no dates and no spouses listed, but we put it in the Lowe family tree database anyway and added all the information about the nearby relatives that we knew. This information was published to the Fenrich Family website along with all of Sharon’s family.
Then one day, we were forwarded an inquiry from someone (Patricia) saying that she thought she might be related to the McDonnells. Tom and Patricia, emailed information back and forth for several days. Tom scanned and emailed the hand-drawn family trees. They realized after looking carefully at the data that they were indeed related. The clincher was when Patricia emailed Tom a picture of the launching of a boat that the family built and Tom realized that we had a picture of the same launching and didn’t know the background information on it because his dad couldn’t remember what it was about! So Tom sent Patricia a picture of his cousin in Ireland standing in front of his boat shed with Tom’s uncle. Patricia confirmed that this was her cousin as well.
Patricia spent numerous hours gathering her information together and putting it into several emails, which Sharon entered into the database (close to 150 records in all!) and discovered through the relationship calculator that Tom and Patricia are third cousins. Tom lives in Michigan and Patricia lives in Belfast! Without these wonderful media, the website and email, they probably would never have “met” and we wouldn’t know about all the relatives we have in Ireland, England, and elsewhere. Sharon printed family group sheets for the entire McDonald/McDonnell clan as we know it presently (about a ream of paper, honestly) and mailed them to Belfast along with a CD containing dozens of pictures of the family here. Both parties are ecstatic about “meeting” and exchanging information.
You never know what you are going to find on someone’s genealogy website. Thank goodness for Google too. Recently, someone made an inquiry about Tom’s maternal grandfather, so we may be learning more about them as well. Never give up the search and be generous with your findings. It will pay off eventually.
