Father's home town family

Tonight I made a new contact with a relative near Bodo,  Norway.  Her grandmother was a sister of my grandfather.  This will  help me fill in some gaps on the family tree.

Fruit for the Tree

Unexpected, but so full of surprises, come the emails and messages with gems of information on our ancestors. Today I received a message via ancestroy.com from a decendent of an Israel family that is part of my wife's ancestry. This person was able to provide compelling confirmation of several people in this branch and we now have that Israel family documented to the mid 1600s in Middlesex, England.

New hints on Hensley family

Getting a lot of new, good hints from Ancestry.com. Just linked my maternal grandmother's Hensley family from Tennessee, back through North Carolina, Virginia, and England. Interesting to see how some ancestors lived not far from where I am now, but the family moved on, and eventually returned, sometimes two or three generations later.

Family Royalty

Occasionally in doing family ancestry work, an interesting line appears. One such is my wife's Miller line. I now have her Miller's connected back to this interesting gentleman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Tudor

Sifting through lives

This weekend my two brothers and I, and our three wives spent three days at my mother's house, clearing it out so it can be sold. It turns out my mother seems to have kept a great deal of the things that came into her life. I now have at my home many boxes of family photos, recipes, newspaper clippings, letters, cards, funeral documents and so forth. A brief look through some of this indicates much of it is things I have never before seen.

So, over the next weeks and months, I will be spending time examining, scanning, and filing away these small scraps of a long life.

Mary Jeanette Bowen Rasmussen

My mother, Mary Jeanette Bowen Rasmussen, passed away November 18, 2011. She was the last of the eleven siblings in her family. This past year she and I had spent enjoyable time scanning old family photos, and her telling me about the people in those pictures. Little did we know at the time that the woman who's doctor kept remarking about her very good health, would find out in October that a new pain in her side would be diagnosed as pancreatic cancer. She died four weeks later.

Her loss is certainly a sad event for our family. However, we are grateful for her 81 years of good health, and the memories we have. With her passing I have also lost a link to our past. Her date of death is now part of my database. No longer can I go to her for family information.

You never know when you might lose a parent. Spend some time with them while you can to document what they can share about family history.

Queen Anne Smith

Last Monday a cousin visited and shared a lot of information. Among this was a letter from a gentleman in Tennessee written to him in 1994. The man had included his phone number and had family connections to our Bowen family. Given that the letter is seventeen years old, I wondered if it might still be possible to contact this person. Then, I noticed he had pointed himself out on a genealogy chart he had included with the letter. he was one year younger than me. I thought it might be worth an attempt to contact him. I dialed the number and in a minute was talking to him!

It turns out that he has a lot of information on our family that is new to me, including pictures. After our phone call, we exchanged emails. He sent me a picture of five young ladies. One of these is Queen Anne Smith, my Bowen grandfather's mother, my great grandmother. This is the first picture of her I have ever seen.

I am so glad I made that call and have this new distant cousin to share information with.