Wednesday, June 08, 2011

The Importance of Staying Connected

In going through my inbox, I re-discovered an email from Jill at Adventures of Grandma Honey, my cousin through the LEMASTER side.  Jill and I are third cousins, her great-grandfather William Clifford and my great-grandfather, Luman Cooper LeMASTER(s) were brothers.


Her ancestor "went west" to Colorado and our families have not been in contact for many years.  Thank you internet for allow us to reconnect and learn more about each other.  I enjoy reading her blog and hope she does the same with mine.


The importance of staying connected hit home when I re-read her initial email to me where she quoted her uncle Don, who knew a bit about the family and after being directed to my blog discovered things he didn't know about the family.  One of the most interesting quotes about his knowledge of the family history was this:


"By the time I was born in 1925, both of my grandfathers were dead. My father's father expired in 1901, my mother's father in 1922. I did not learn until many years later that a great-grandfather survived until I was 6! Here he was a Civil War hero and my mother never mentioned him! If my memory is correct, he had 12 children."
 Here, just a few generations removed, the fact that a great-grandfather had served in the Civil War was lost to that branch of the family!  That is why we do this research - so that other generations do not lose their history.


Later in the email, Jill's uncle Don mentioned Dr. Ord Otterbein LeMASTER, a younger brother of our great-grandfathers:


"I noted in that genealogy website a man named Ord LeMaster, who was a physician from Sidney, Ohio.
When he retired — it could have been the late '40s — he came to California and my mother and I went to Los Angeles to meet him at a family reunion."
Dr. Ord died in 1937, so it must have been in the mid-1930s when he visited.  So at least 70 years had gone by since our families have reconnected again via the Internet.


If you get a chance, take a visit over to the Adventures of Grandma Honey and say "hello" to cousin Jill.

1 comment:

Grandma Honey said...

Aren't you sweet Travis. I love being mentioned in your blog.