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What's Love Got to Do With It?
– Megan Smolenyak
Admittedly, the words "genealogy" and "romance" aren't often heard together in the same sentence, but you'd be surprised how often the two are linked. I should know. I recently married a man I met through my family history research. Yes, it's the classic tale of love and roots: Boy appears in one of girl's databases sent by a mutual, distant cousin. Curious boy looks up girl while on a business trip in her area. Girl realizes there's more to boy than his name, birth date, birthplace, and source notes. Boy and girl marry and spend lots of time together in archives and surfing the Internet.
And we're not the only ones! Here's the tale of another genealogical love match:
A Fresh Branch "After the death of my grandfather, I got the genealogy bug. It started with the gathering of family photos and progressed to writing the family history. Several years ago, I took another step and began creating a Web site for Stovalls. During this initiative, I also pursued my Wallace, Cox, Raney, and other related family lines.
"One day I received an e-mail about the Wallace line from a fellow named Ron Ritchie. Although I lived in Birmingham, Alabama and he lived in Dallas, Texas, he had some Wallaces from the same area from which mine originated. We corresponded several times, after which he passed the baton to his daughter. She e-mailed me, and after six months or so, we reached the conclusion that we were not related.
"With no more data to work on, she and I chatted about our other interests and one thing led to another. The end result? This shy Alabama born boy found himself flying to Dallas to meet a girl.
"Before this, I had always joked that my redhead girlfriend was probably living 600 miles away. When I landed and met Connie, I had flown 650 miles and ended up arm in arm with a redhead!
"During several subsequent trips, we explored the sites, met each other's families, and plotted our lives. In 1997, we were married. Our search for roots had led instead to a fresh branch on our now combined family tree. I think it's only fair to give our ancestors the credit!"
Tommy Stovall, Alabama
The love connection above began when two people thought they were related and discovered that they weren't, but sometimes it works the other way around:
An Unbreakable Bond "In 1990, I was in a computer store when I bumped into somebody. I looked up to say, 'Excuse me,' and saw the most intensely beautiful eyes looking right into my soul. Right away, Stephen and I knew we were destined to remain together.
"We had so much in common that we hardly noticed that it was a bit of a coincidence that we both had grandmothers who had been avid genealogists and had left us with our respective maternal genealogies back to the 1600s. But this piece of trivia aroused the curiosity of Kate Connolly, a friend of Stephen's and a keen family historian. She asked to have a look at the genealogies our grandmothers had given to us, and we saw no reason not to indulge her request.
"A week before we were to be married in 1993, Kate called and said, 'Is Stephen there? Sit down. You gotta hear this. You guys are distant cousins!'
"She told us how our grandmothers' papers revealed that our families were friends who had come over from England together on the same ship - the Zouch Phenix - to Massachusetts in 1624. Stephen's family name was Balch and mine was Gardner. After the two families arrived in America, Benjamin Balch and Sarah Gardner were married!
"Kate sketched a simple chart showing the generations leading down to Stephen and me, making it easy to see that we were tenth cousins once removed. Receiving this news just before our wedding made it even more meaningful to us. Our ancestors had married on the shores of a new world and we were now embarking on a new beginning more than 350 years later, rekindling the bond that had quietly connected our families all these years.
"We did not know then how brief our time together was to be. My husband died of cancer only three years after our wedding. It's been five years now, but we're still inseparable. Our bond was there before we even knew each other, and it will be there forever."
Kim Anderson, Florida
Genealogical Connections In my mind, genealogy is largely about connections - hidden ones unearthed such as Kim and Stephen's and new ones formed such as Tommy and Connie's. On this Valentine's Day, I wish every one of you the happy, genealogical experience of discovering or making your own special connections, be they of the romantic variety or otherwise!
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These and ninety-nine other tales that can be found in Megan Smolenyak's In Search of Our Ancestors: 101 Inspiring Stories of Serendipity and Connection in Rediscovering Our Family History, companion book to the PBS 2000 Ancestors series. Be sure to look for her next collection in the forthcoming Honoring Our Ancestors: Inspiring Stories of the Quest for Our Roots. If you'd like to share your own experiences or contact Megan, please visit her Web site at: www.honoringourancestors.com.
(Copyright © 1998-2001, MyFamily.com Inc. and its subsidiaries.), "Ancestry Daily News" (http://www.ancestry.com/dailynews)
Mailing Lists
Mailing lists can be a goldmine of information for genealogy researchers. In a mailing list, a single e-mail address is established as the administration address. Any e-mail messages sent to that address are forwarded to everyone who subscribes to the mailing list. On a popular list, you can receive hundreds of e-mails in a single day.
Key Points to Remember
To subscribe to a human maintained list, just e-mail your request to the list administrator and they will add you to the list. The administrator's address is typically made up of the list name, followed by -request, then the domain name (i.e. samplelist-request@sampledomain.com). To unsubscribe, send a message to that same address requesting your e-mail address be removed from the list.
Computer administered mailing lists are subscribed to in two different, yet similar, ways. Refer to the instructions that accompany each list description. However, in general, to subscribe, send an e-mail with the following information in the body of the message:
subscribe listname your e-mail addressTo unsubscribe to a computer maintained list, send the following:
(i.e. subscribe samplelist-request@sampledomain.com nwagner@wagner.com)
unsubscribe listnameor with some lists
signoff listname
- After subscribing to a mailing list you will most likely receive a welcome message from the list owner. This is an important email to read as it contains operating and contact information.
- Most mailing lists have two email addresses which serve two separate functions. One will handle subscribe/unsubscribe requests, the other is for posting your messages to.
- There are moderated and un-moderated lists
- a moderated list involves a human filtering the messages to make sure only appropriate messages are received by subscribers.
- an un-moderated list involves no intervention - all messages posted are sent to subscribers.
- You can receive list messages in three different ways. These are mail mode, index mode and digest mode.
Mail Mode - you receive each message as a separate email.
Index Mode - an index is sent to you listing the subject and author of all messages. You can then specify which messages you would like to receive.
Digest Mode - separate emails are sent together as one large email. This cuts down the number of individual emails sent.
- The "Netiquette" that applies to newsgroups also applies to mailing lists.
- Stay on-topic.- If you have something to discuss that is only of interest to a particular person, then carry out this discussion using email rather than broadcasting it to the entire list.
- If you are hesitant about posting to a mailing list you can "lurk". By lurking your participation only involves watching how everything works. By observing what is acceptable and what is not, you can avoid making mistakes when the time comes for you to make a post.
- Each mailing list will have it's own rules, make sure you follow them.
- If you would like to start your own mailing list visit Yahoo Groups. This is a free mailing list service that offers all the tools necessary to run a mailing list of your own. Click Here for more information.
- The internet has thousands of FREE genealogy related mailing lists. There are location lists, surname lists, national lists, state and county lists, international lists, geneology software lists, and lists for different research techniques.
Mailing List Sources
RootsWeb provides an extensive index of over 22,000 geneology mailing lists. It also hosts the largest and oldest genealogy mailing list with over 10,000 subscribers (Click here to subscribe).
You will see on the home page an extensive index of surname, USA, and international mailing lists.
Those new to computers or genealogy can subscribe to the GEN-NEWBIE List.
SurnameGuide.com lists thousands of surname-related mailing lists.
You will see a link to "Surname Lists" on the top left-hand side of the homepage.
Genealogy Resources on the Internet
This website has one of the most extensive and well maintained mailing list indexes on the net.
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