Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It's Saturday Night again -
Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
1) Most genealogists try to stay in contact with their aunts, uncles and cousins. Who among them made the most effort to stay in contact your family? Did they write, use the telephone, send cards or gifts? Did they visit you, and/or did you visit them?
2) Share your cousin experiences in your own blog post or on your Facebook page. Be sure to leave a link to your report in a comment on this post.
Here's mine:
My mother was an only child, and her parents were only children, so there were no aunts and uncles or first cousins. There were great-aunts and uncles, and 2nd cousins, but very few in California. My maternal grandparents would visit with Kemp and Auble relatives in the Los Angeles area, and my grandmother had a fairly extensive letter correspondence at times.
My father was born in Massachusetts and had a brother and four sisters who married and had children. So I had 8 first cousins who are now scattered to Michigan, Arizona, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Florida. My father's sister, Geraldine (Seaver) Remley had no children of her own, but she was the youngest sibling of my father and became the "contact person" who knew everything about the family, partly because she lived with her mother for many years and heard stories. My father left Massachusetts in 1940 and came to San Diego, His Aunt Emily (sister of his mother) lived in San Diego since about 1910, and she had one daughter who was my dad's first cousin, and a granddaughter who was my 2nd cousin, and we saw them occasionally over the years. Gerry and her mother came for my parents wedding in San Diego in 1942, and my dad's brother Ed was in San Diego in 1944 in the U.S. Navy. My family and my dad's mother exchanged gifts for many years. I think all of his siblings sent Christmas cards with family news.
My dad's older sister Evelyn and her husband, their granddaughter Diana, and my dad's mother drove to San Diego on vacation in 1959. That was the only time I met my paternal grandmother. But it opened the door a bit for his siblings to visit - Marion, Ed and Gerry came several times in the late 1960s through the 1990s. Ed and Gerry started phoning my father to talk to him occasionally (long distance was a toll call then). Two of my first cousins visited and stayed with my parents and my brother in the late 1960s after their college. My father never went back to Massachusetts.
By 1966, I was working and had work to do in Boston, so I went to Massachusetts several times and was able to stay with Aunt Gerry and she took me to several family gatherings and the aunts, uncles and cousins all told me stories about my father. They also shared photographs. Linda and I and our young daughters visited friends in Massachusetts, and visited Uncle Ed, Aunt Ruth, Aunt Gerry, and cousin Virginia and several other cousins on a three week vacation in 1982 - we had a week with Aunt Gerry and her husband in her cabin in the Maine woods and had a great time. I made an audio tape with Uncle Ed on that trip and we talked about the Seaver and Richmond families.
My brother Scott and I attended Uncle Ed's 50th wedding anniversary party in Leominster in 1990, and stayed with the New Hampshire cousins for several days. As a result of that trip, Aunts Marion and Ruth wrote letters about their life, and Aunt Gerry made four hours of audio tapes about her life and memories of the families. I transcribed the letters and audio tapes.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Linda and I went to New England and Florida several times to see the family and do genealogy research. As part of my genealogy work, I sent the 10-page "Seaver-Richmond Family History Journal" to the aunts and uncle and cousins each Christmas from 1990 to 2014 to try to stay connected with everybody. Uncle Ed died in 2004 and Aunt Gerry died in 2007, and now I've lost three of my first cousins. I still send Christmas cards with our family letter to all of the cousins I know about. I guess I'm the one that now tries to stay in touch with my cousins.
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