Learning from a Loss

My great-aunt passed away last month and my condolences go out to her immediate family. I only met her once when I was very young, but do have a fond memory of that visit to the Syracuse portion of my family.

In all honesty, I was not even aware of her passing until my father mentioned in an email that she had died in a car accident.

I followed up with my father, but he had no further information on what happened. As a technologist and the family genealogist, I thought there had to be a way to leverage technology to find out what happened. Of course, I could have just called my relatives, but a call out of the blue in this situation seemed inappropriate.

So I started my search ...

The good news is she had a fairly uncommon name and lived in a medium sized town, making the initial search a bit easier. As it turns out, her daughter-in-law is a published author and a blogger. She wrote a touching blog post about her mother-in-law that I found via Google.

However, the daughter-in-law kept her maiden name and my genealogy records did not have her maiden name. The blog post's author mentioned her husband and two kids, but no names, so I couldn't tell for sure that I had this figured out.

My next break came when someone commenting on the blog post added her condolences to the blog's author and also mentioned the husband's name, which matched my relative's name. With the blog post's connection complete, I started searching for more information on the survivors. I soon found that the blogger's husband (my blood relative) had both a LinkedIn and Facebook profile. I learned he is a successful lawyer and still finds time to play drums in a local band.

This further cemented my background and allowed me to update my genealogy records. So out of the loss came some new connections. I learned that my great-aunt lived a good life and left some outstanding family members.

I also learned some tricks for continuing my genealogy work and used that work to update our family tree on our genealogy wiki, WeRelate.

I encourage everyone to learn more about their families. Genealogy is one of those areas that many technologists are either already involved with or would find interesting. I look forward to hearing your genealogy stories as comments to this post.