MODERATOR NOTE: Please share your success stories with the GerSIG Forum.
Dear Cousins:
It was wonderful meeting so many of you at IAJGS this past week in
NYC. Our SIG is especially blessed with many talented researchers,
historians and teachers...all willing to share the fruits of their labor.
Thank you all. Now it is my turn to share and hopefully inspire people to
keep digging.......and never stop asking questions!
After our Sig meeting, I finally got up the nerve to place a phone
call to a prominent man in New York City with the same family name I have
been researching for 20 years. I had seen his name with multiple hits on
Google, which made me hesitant to contact him. However, I was inspired by
all of the news shared at our meeting and pressed forward. The result of
that phone call included the following:
1) Nobody hung up on me!
2) We had a one hour phone conversation full of interesting family names,
dates, places and stories and a mutual promise to keep in touch as I put his
information into my family tree software while I also keep researching our ties
3) The wonderful possibility of family ties going back to Posen, Prussia
(our g-g-g-grandparents are probably one and the same)
4) A hefty package waiting for me when I returned home >from NY --my new
cousin had overnighted me a folder full of genealogical information going
back to the 1790's and including living descendents all over the U.S.
5) A funny story, shared by both our families: Over the years, the elders
of both families claimed that the pre-emigration roots of the family, were
the genteel "Alsace-Lorraine"---totally untrue. His family came >from Posen
and Schneidemuhl in Prussia as did mine! I was stunned that he had been told
the exact same fictitious story that my great grandfather told my father as
a young boy--and which my father found amusing enough to share with me 20
years ago, when we discovered our roots were actually in Prussia.
6) We made plans to meet in person sometime soon.
So keep digging, and keep sharing--
Felicia Mode Alexander fmode@... Langhorne, PA
Researching: MODE, SHUMAN, ABRAHAMS IN Posen, Prussia, Berlin and USA
