New branches on family tree (9/7/05)

Thanks to a cousin I haven’t talked to in years, I now know my great-grandfather’s name.

Genealogy has never been a high priority at our house.

Thanks to Connie’s aunt, it’s possible to trace her mother’s family back to the earliest days of America. (A uniform from the War of 1812 can still be found in the attic of the old farmhouse in upstate New York where my mother-in-law was raised.)

But her father’s side of the family gets a little fuzzy.

In my case, there’s a wealth of genealogical information on my mother’s family. But she was adopted at birth by Edward and Carrie Haynes of Portland, so there will always be an asterisk beside those branches of the family tree.

The Ronald side has had some tantalizing details: The family tartan when we were part of the McDonnell of Keppoch clan eons ago, for instance.

But the big picture was hard to find.

That changed last week with an e-mail from my cousin, Ron Hine, who lives in New Jersey.

Ron’s mother — my aunt Janet Ronald Hine — died this summer in Arizona and is well remembered by a certain generation of senior citizens in Jay County. Aunt Janet was also a much more dedicated pursuer of the family genealogy than anyone else in the family.

And her son has now picked up her research, using the Internet to track down cousins in places like Alberta, Canada.

Ron and I haven’t seen each other in decades. Once, when I was probably 10 and he was 12, I visited for a few days with his family in Illinois.

And there were some summers in the early 1960s when extended parts of my father’s family gathered to camp together at places like Burt Lake in Michigan.

But that was a long, long time ago.

So it was a little strange to be getting back in touch in connection with his genealogical research, and when I learned how much he had discovered, it was like plunging down a rabbit hole.

Ron, building on his mother’s research, can document generations of the Ronald family back to 1832 when our branch first arrived in Canada and further back to the mid-1700s when the family figured in a Robert Burns poem in Ayrshire, Scotland. He could tell me where my great-grandfather is buried in Ontario and give me the general vicinity of the location of a stone house built by my great-great grandfather in 1853.

It’s pretty cool stuff, but as any genealogy buff can tell you it’s more interesting when it’s your family and quickly becomes boring when it’s someone else’s.

“Your ancestors were a little short on imagination,” said my wife, as I recounted a ridiculously long string of Williams who had sons they named Hugh and Hughes who had sons they named William.

But I did learn my great-grandfather Ronald’s name after all these years.

It was James.[[In-content Ad]]