Family Stories – GenealogyAtHeart.com

When the Past Reaches Into the Present

Photo by Author showing the works of the 2 German Colleagues Discussed in the Blog

Genealogists often speak of connections. We search for them in records, reconstruct them through evidence, and celebrate them when we discover how families intersect across time and place. Occasionally, however, those connections seem to take on a life of their own.

In June I had the opportunity to present at a conference devoted to Palatine migration and German-American history. My presentations examined the experiences of German immigrants and their descendants to America and experiences they endured during times of war and discrimination. As I prepared for the final lecture, I had no idea that I was about to experience one of the strangest and most memorable moments of the entire conference.

The previous afternoon, I had been browsing through a collection of journals that were being offered to attendees. As I flipped through one issue, I was delighted to discover an article written in 1999 by a distant cousin in Germany. The find made me smile. It is always rewarding to encounter the work of family members who share a passion for history and genealogy.

At that very moment, the conference announcer introduced a representative from an exhibiting organization. To my surprise, the speaker happened to be the spouse of another cousin of the article’s author.

The coincidence made me smile, but the story did not end there.

As I continued paging through the journal, my phone chimed. A text message had just arrived from our shared cousin in Germany. He wished me well and said he hoped my presentation was going successfully.

Before I could finish reading the message, my phone chimed again. This time it was a colleague in the Palatinate with a question about American Revolutionary War research.

I looked at the journal in my hands, listened to the cousin’s spouse speaking before the audience, and glanced at the two messages that had just arrived from Germany.

Three connections. Three individuals. Three entirely separate events occurring within moments of one another.

As genealogists, we spend our lives connecting people across time and distance. Yet every so often, those connections seem to converge in a way that reminds us just how small our world can be.

The following day, during my final presentation, I spoke about the collaborative nature of genealogy. No researcher works entirely alone. We depend on archivists, translators, local historians, distant cousins, and fellow researchers who generously share their knowledge and expertise.

As I concluded my remarks, I displayed a photograph taken at a Christmas market in the Palatinate. The image included several individuals who have contributed to my research efforts over the years. I briefly introduced them and described the unique role each has played in helping me better understand the lives of our shared ancestors.

I held up my phone and showed the audience the timestamps as I described what had occurred the previous afternoon.

The audience laughed and applauded, but many also seemed to appreciate the deeper significance of the moment. These folks clearly understood as one of their lifetime members, Hank Z. Jones, has written two books on Psychic Roots.

Genealogy is often described as the study of the dead. I have never believed that.

Genealogy is fundamentally the study of relationships.

Some relationships connect us to ancestors who lived centuries ago. Others connect us to cousins we have only recently discovered. Still others link us to archivists, historians, translators, and researchers who help us reconstruct the stories of those who came before us.

Most of these connections develop slowly and quietly.

Occasionally, however, they reveal themselves in ways that feel almost magical.

No, I do not believe the texts were supernatural. Nor do I believe fate was orchestrating a dramatic conference finale.

But I do believe that genealogy teaches us to recognize the invisible threads that connect people across time and distance.

On that day, those threads became visible.

A journal article written decades earlier. A conference attendee related through marriate to its author. A photograph taken months before in the ancestral homeland. Messages arriving from Germany at precisely the right moment.

What are the odds?

Perhaps that is the wrong question.

The better question may be this: How many connections surround us every day that we simply fail to notice?

Genealogists spend their lives looking for connections.

Sometimes, if we are fortunate, the connections find us.

Hidden Way: A Genealogist’s Mystery

Last October, I wrote about an extraordinary wedding record I discovered for my maternal grandmother, Mary Koss. This year, Grandma Mary, who we called Non, managed to do it again and the unsettling circumstances surrounding it make this one a perfect example of synchronicity.

In April, I contacted a Croatian court-appointed translator to handle the translation and apostille process for my family’s vital records as part of our dual-citizenship applications. The translator had originally been recommended by the Croatian consulate, and we had corresponded briefly the previous fall.

Then…nothing.

After three unanswered emails over the course of three and a half weeks, I contacted the consulate again requesting another recommendation. Their reply was brief: they were no longer providing names. After being thoroughly ghosted, I could understand why.

Fortunately, a former client who had completed the process a year earlier gave me the name of a translator in Split. The response this time was immediate and professional. The pricing was reasonable, the turnaround time was clear, and after a few emails back and forth, I sent payment through an international bank transfer.

About a week later, I received an email from DHL Express containing a waybill tracking number for the return shipment of my documents. (See above)

That’s when things became strange.

The shipment notification listed the wrong street address, the wrong zip code, and typed in ominous capital letters, the city of GARY.

I do not live in Gary, Indiana.

I’ll admit it: I panicked.

My original documents were apparently somewhere in international transit headed to the wrong place. I immediately searched online maps to see whether the mysterious street existed either in my own city or in Gary. It did not.

The zip code error at least made sense. I had accidentally mistyped it in an earlier email but quickly sent a correction afterward. The translator later admitted she had overlooked the follow-up and used the earlier message instead. That explained the zip code.

It did not explain the street name.

And it certainly did not explain GARY.

I contacted the translator, who was just as confused as I was. Her paperwork showed neither the incorrect street name nor the city of Gary. Concerned, she returned to the DHL office in person. The clerk checked their system and was equally baffled. According to DHL’s records, the strange address information simply did not exist in their computer system.

Yet it certainly existed in the email I received.

For privacy reasons, I removed the house number and waybill information from the image above, but the bizarre street name and city remain exactly as they appeared.

Sure, technology glitches happen. Addresses become corrupted. Autofill creates odd errors. But what makes this incident feel especially unsettling is the particular combination of the street name and the city itself.

My grandmother moved to Gary in 1919 as a teenage bride and lived there until 1973, when she relocated to Florida after her oldest daughter was transferred there for work. Grandma never cared much for Florida, so two years later she moved again, this time to Arizona, where her youngest daughter lived. The desert climate didn’t suit her either, and eventually she returned once more to Florida.

A few years later, she developed Alzheimer’s disease.

Her children had promised they would never place her in a nursing home, so she moved in with her middle daughter in Pennsylvania. When that daughter became ill, Grandma was relocated once again to Arizona, where her youngest daughter left her job to care for her full time.

Grandma died in Arizona.

But her body was brought home for burial in, you guessed it, Gary.

As for the mysterious street name? Hidden Way Drive.

There is no such street connected to my city, nor to Gary. Yet somehow those words appeared in connection with documents tied directly to my Croatian ancestry and my grandmother’s family line.

“Hidden Way.”

Honestly, that is just creepy enough to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

Was it merely a bizarre technological glitch? A random collision of data somewhere deep in DHL’s system? Perhaps.

Or maybe Grandma was finding one more way to remind me that genealogy often refuses to stay neatly inside the boundaries of logic.

Sometimes the past nudges back.

And sometimes, I like to think, our ancestors let us know they approve.

When the Past Finds You

Last week, I shared my husband’s strange encounter with the universe. This week, it’s my turn.

Ever since I had my mtDNA test in 2010, I’ve wanted to visit Kos Island in the Aegean Sea. The results confirmed a family story my grandmother, Mary Kos Koss, told me years ago.

As a child, I had asked her where our family came from. “A village outside of Zagreb,” she said.

Something made me ask again, where had they lived before that? She paused, then told me that long ago, around the time of Christ, the family had been grape farmers on an island to the south. They left due to overpopulation and drought, moving inland.

At the time, the only “island” I knew was from Gilligan’s Island. Still, I made a quiet promise to myself: one day, I would find that place.

It took nearly sixty years.

My only regret is that my grandmother wasn’t here to hear the result.

DNA revealed that my maternal line had crossed the island of Kos. What makes that extraordinary is this: the surname had been there all along. Kos.

They had forgotten the place but carried its name for generations.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that when I finally planned the trip, the universe didn’t make it easy. My husband found a great deal to travel to Greece on September 11. In hindsight, perhaps the date should have given me pause but it didn’t.

Two travel agents couldn’t figure out how to get us there, so I booked the flights myself. Then I added two extra days after the tour so I could finally visit Kos.

A week before departure, we were told the trip might be canceled. The cruise ship was stuck in the Strait of Hormuz due to the Iran conflict.

Three days later, a new plan emerged: instead of visiting Turkey, Rhodes, and Santorini, we would spend four days in Crete. Not ideal but I still had my eye on Kos.

What I didn’t realize was that this detour would make the most unexpected moment of the trip possible. On our third day in Crete, the sky changed.

It shifted from bright blue…
to white…
to pewter…
and then to red.

Breathing became difficult. My eyes burned. Some people whispered about the apocalypse.

I suspected a Sahara dust storm. We probably should have stayed at the hotel that evening. Instead, we kept our plans to meet a group of University of Crete students at a taverna. As educators, neither my husband nor I felt right canceling.

The drive there was… questionable. Imagine a bus navigating mountain roads with no guardrails, in near-whiteout conditions except the sky was red.

Still, we pressed on and we arrived safely.

At dinner, one of the students sat next to me and asked what had brought me to Greece. I told her my story. She listened carefully, then stood and said, “I’ll be back.”

A few minutes later, she returned with someone else.

My husband later said it best: “She looked like you… fifty years ago.” Her name was Argy. She was from Kos.

We spent the evening talking about her future, my upcoming visit to her homeland, and the strange coincidence that had brought us together. We laughed. We sang. We danced. At one point, we looked at each other and simply agreed, we must be related. Thirty generations back, perhaps.

Of course, with European ancestry, that’s not unusual. But the resemblance… that was something else entirely. Even her academic interests mirrored my own.

And it struck me:

If the cruise ship hadn’t been delayed…
If the itinerary hadn’t changed…
If we hadn’t gone to Crete…
If we had stayed in the hotel that night…

I would never have met her.

More than that, I likely would have missed Kos entirely.

The original itinerary would have placed us on a small island that day, one without a proper port. We would have relied on ferries to return to the ship, and due to the storm, those ferries had stopped running.

We would have been stranded. On the wrong island. Missing my connection to Athens and my flight to Kos.

Sometimes, in genealogy, we’re told to be patient. What we’re not told is why patience matters.

This is why.

And the story didn’t end there.

When we arrived on Kos, I had trouble reaching the tour company I had booked for a half-day excursion. The hotel staff tried as well, no response. It appeared I had been scammed through Travelocity.

Disappointed, not just in the lost money, but in the missed opportunity, I mentioned it to the hotel clerk. She smiled and said, “If no one shows tomorrow, I will find someone for you.”

She did.

His name was George and he was extraordinary.

George had an interest in archaeology and took us beyond the typical tourist stops, to the area where vineyards had grown two thousand years ago.

Today, it’s a Roma encampment.

I couldn’t help but laugh. My grandfather was of Roma descent. His surname? Kos, later Anglicized to Koss.

Standing there, I had to wonder: Had his line once lived here, too? I don’t have the YDNA to prove it. Two cousins could test, but neither is interested.

For now, it remains a question.

But I’ve learned this much: In genealogy, we follow the paper trail. Sometimes, if we’re lucky something else leads us the rest of the way.

Some journeys take sixty years to begin.

Others have been waiting for thousands.

When the Universe Almost Got It Right

It’s October, my favorite time of year for sharing the synchronicities I’ve experienced over the past year.

I think I may have finally found a clue to what triggers these odd experiences if “channeling” is even the right word. For me, it seems to be travel.

Last year, we stayed close to home due to my husband’s surgery. This year, now that he’s recovered, we’ve been on the move again and with that movement came two unusual moments. One for him, one for me.

This week, we’ll talk about his.

On my mother’s 108th birthday, I made the three-hour drive to Chicago to have the last of our dual citizenship documents apostilled.

The date wasn’t intentional. I had planned to go the week before, but I was still recovering from the Sahara dust storm I encountered in Crete. April 14th simply became the most practical option.

The drive was anything but smooth; pounding rain, a major accident, closed exits, heavy traffic, and no convenient parking. What should have taken three hours stretched to nearly four.

At the clerk’s office, things went surprisingly well.

I had expected an issue with my mother’s record. Her official “birth record” was, in fact, a no record found document something I knew might happen. Family history and church records I obtained confirmed that her birth had been registered through a Roman Catholic parish, which at the time was acceptable. Later changes in the law complicated that.

What I didn’t expect was that the county would issue an official vital record stating the absence of a record. Several colleagues have since told me that shouldn’t have happened, that it should have been a simple letter.

The apostille clerk hesitated. Paused. Looked again.

Then approved it.

Some might call that a gift from the universe. I call it something simpler: common sense.

We didn’t linger. Severe storms were forecast, and we wanted to get home.

Crossing into Indiana, as we passed through Gary, my husband suddenly said:

“I’d like to drive by my old house.”

This was… unusual.

I’m the one who detours for old homes, cemeteries, and ancestral land. He’s the one who prefers the direct route. And we had already agree, get home as quickly as possible.

I nearly made the exit but couldn’t get over in time.

I asked if he knew another way. He did.

Then he said something that stopped me: “I don’t know why I just said that. I have no idea why I want to go there.”

We had just returned from Greece, where he had patiently followed me to a remote ancestral location tied to my mtDNA from two thousand years ago. So, naturally, I was willing to return the favor. Fifteen minutes out of our way seemed more than fair.

As I moved toward the next exit, he spoke again: “I didn’t know we had to pay a toll here. Forget it. Just go home.”

I asked if he was sure. He was.

Again, he said: “I don’t even know why I wanted to go.”

We made it home just before the storms hit. As we walked in the door, his phone pinged. An email.

He opened it, paused, and said: “Oh… you won’t believe this.”

The message was from his childhood friend, Bill, who now lives in California.

Bill had traveled to northwest Indiana to visit his mother who, as it turns out, shares the same birthday as my mom’s. Her 91st.

While in town, Bill decided to visit his old neighborhood. He stopped at their former elementary school now an antique mall.

And there, on the wall, were class photos. Not from every year. Not from every class. Just his class, grades 1 through 5.

At that exact moment, while we were passing through Gary on the interstate, Bill was standing there, looking at those photos, thinking about my husband.

He wrote that he wished he had thought to reach out. That they could have met.

We had been minutes away.

One exit.

One decision.

And yet we drove on.

I can’t help but think of the FAN Club in genealogy: friends, associates, and neighbors. The people who surround our ancestors and, in many ways, become extensions of family.

We trace them on paper. We follow their movements. We reconstruct their connections.

But sometimes those connections don’t stay in the past. Sometimes, the connection is still there.

We just don’t take the exit.

An Island Without a Name

Did you guess where I traveled? It was Kos Island, Greece.

I’ve gone back in time, way back, to a place where my ancestors lived nearly 2,000 years ago. This journey didn’t begin with a record set or an archive, but with a story passed down by my grandmother. She said our family once left an island to the south, around the time of Christ. They were vintners. There were too many people. The land was dry. They left because they had to. She didn’t know the name of the island, only the reason they went.

For years, that story lingered as just that: a story. But when mitochondrial DNA entered the picture, something remarkable happened. My mtDNA traces directly across Kos Island, an island whose name my family has carried, in one form or another, since at least the 1200s, when I first find them documented in their later home in Croatia. Even more compelling, historical research confirms that Kos was overpopulated and experienced periods of drought roughly 2,000 years ago. The pieces fit, not perfectly, but persuasively.

What fascinates me most is not that the story was complete, but that it was true enough. Family stories rarely preserve dates, place names, or precise routes. What they do preserve are motives: hunger, pressure, hope, survival. In this case, the story of farmers leaving an unnamed island aligns with both genetic evidence and environmental history. That’s not coincidence, that’s migration memory.

This is why I never dismiss family stories outright. Even when details are missing or blurred, they often contain a core truth waiting to be tested. With the right tools, DNA, geography, climate history, and records, we can sometimes confirm far more than we expect. Migration leaves footprints not just in documents, but in names, occupations, and the quiet persistence of who we are.

Concluding a Narrative Writing Project

At 5:51 p.m. on 1 February, I finished the final narrative for my latest work, Echoes of Britannia.

It was a genuinely momentous moment. For the first time, I have written a narrative for every ancestor I can currently identify. That mattered to me more than I can easily explain. I wanted to leave my research to my descendants in a way that restores my forebears’ humanity after generations of being flattened into little more than names and dates inside a software program.

Treating their lives seriously mattered. Some of them made choices I wouldn’t have made. Some lived in ways that feel foreign or uncomfortable to modern sensibilities. But they deserved to be acknowledged. If not for them, I wouldn’t be here. None of us would.

I wanted to record their lives in a durable format, so I chose to present these stories as bound books. Actually, ten bound books. Yes, I did get a little carried away.

When I began sketching ideas last March for a book about my husband’s and my British ancestors, I had no idea how much research I had accumulated over the years. And, in all honesty, some of it was utter garbage. Early on, I trusted unsourced online trees. Some “sources” later turned out to be incorrect or wildly speculative. Pruning my tree was not fun, but it was necessary. I wanted a stable, explainable record; one where the evidence supports the tree, not the other way around. Family history shouldn’t rest entirely on folklore, though the tall tales sometimes earned a place, clearly labeled as such.

Initially, I imagined two volumes: one covering our five primary British ancestral lines as they extended into the United States, and a second devoted to their allied families “across the pond.” That plan didn’t last long. The records I had gathered, baptismal, marriage, and burial registers; land charters; court cases as plaintiffs and defendants; censuses taken hundreds of years ago, contained far too many compelling details to compress into just two books.

As the stories grew, so did the project. Two volumes became ten.
Volume 1 focuses on our family in the New World.
Volume 2 covers our medieval gentry.
Volumes 3 and 4 record the lives of knights and barons.

I thought that might be the end but I quickly learned our “British” ancestors were not always British. Volumes 5 and 6 explore our Anglo-Norman families who arrived in the British Isles around the time of William the Conqueror, who, somewhat astonishingly, turns out to be one of our many great-grandfathers. His lineage alone justified Volume 7: British High Nobility.

Even that wasn’t the end. Our family tree is less a tree than a bush. The final three volumes follow far-flung Continental European ancestors whose descendants eventually migrated to Great Britain.

Along the way, I’ve learned an extraordinary amount about historical eras I once barely understood. I’ll be sharing some of those discoveries here on the blog over the coming weeks.

Although the narrative writing is now complete, there is still plenty of work ahead before publication, editing, cleaning thousands of footnotes, writing an index (ugh), adding photographs, and sourcing every one of them. Still, the hardest part is finished.

And that feels pretty darn good.

Before Vaccines: The Quiet Evidence in Our Family Trees

If you build enough family trees, you start to notice patterns that don’t show up in history textbooks. Clusters of deaths. Children gone within days or weeks of each other. Young adults who disappear from the records in the same winter. Entire branches that simply… stop.

Before vaccines, epidemics were not rare events. They were a recurring feature of American life. And their story is written, quietly and relentlessly, in our family trees.

Genealogists see this world all the time. We see it in death certificates. In burial registers. In families where three or four children never reach adulthood. We see it in causes of death that barely register emotionally anymore because they’ve become abstract words: influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, small pox.

But these were not abstractions. They were people. Families. Empty chairs at tables.

One of my first family members in America to die of a preventable disease today was my 4th great grandfather’s John Morrison’s first wife and child, Isobel Fraser Morrison and their son, Alexander. Philiadelphia experienced a yellow fever epidemic and the dead were recorded in a book written the following year. John would go on to marry Elenor Jackson Robinson, a widow of another victim, James Robinson.

Mathew Carey. A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia, London, England, 1794, p. 148, digital image; Googlebooks.com: accessed 10 Jan 2026.

One of my great grandmothers was Emma Kuhn Landfair. Her death certificate lists tuberculosis. That alone would have been enough. But the story doesn’t end there. Like so many women of her time, Emma lived in circumstances that made both illness and survival harder than they should have been. Tuberculosis was the disease that took her, but it did not act alone. The record tells us the official cause. The context tells us the rest.

Emma lost two children to disease that could have been prevented today with vaccines. Her oldest son, John Leo Landfair died at age 1 of “brain fever,” likely encephalitis or meningitis.

Ohio County Death Records, 1840-2001, John L. Landfair, 1886, digital image; FamilySearch.org: accessed 10 Jan 2026, image 154 of 173, citing FHIL Film 004017319.

In 1985, the infant son of a former colleague and dear friend contracted meningitis. He survived, but it changed the course of his life, leaving him with permanent disabilities. Thankfully, there is a vaccine for that today.

Another family member is Joseph Kos Sr., who died during the great influenza epidemic of 1918–1919. That pandemic is now a paragraph in history books. In real families, it was a before-and-after moment. It erased parents. It left children without fathers and mothers. It rewrote futures in a single season.

A few weeks ago I had community member tell me that she would not get the flu vaccine because she had survived having the flu in the past. Joseph Koss didn’t have an option as no vaccine was available for him. He was just 41 years old when he died.

These are not statistics. These are my people.

And they are not unusual.

Every genealogist who looks closely enough at their own tree will find similar stories.

But the past is not only in our documents. Some of it still lives in memory.

When I was in third grade, a classmate of mine died of meningitis. I still remember him. I still remember the call my mom got from our class’s PTA rep who asked my mom to come to school, which had been cancelled, to clean the room. They burned everything in our classroom in the school’s incinerator, hoping to end the spread of the disease. We didn’t return to class for a week and when we did, all remindings of Michael were gone. But I didn’t forget, I still have his photo.

Michael

Two neighborhood friends, Ray and Carol, survived rubella, but not without permanent consequences. They lived, but they lived changed. I also almost died of rubella myself.

Ray, Lori, Mike, Carol, photo taken by Dorothy Koss Leininger, Jun 1966.

And there was a girl I knew who spent her days in an iron lung due to polio. Many people today have never seen one. I have not forgotten.

These things are not ancient history. They are not medieval. They are not myths.

They are the world as it was within living memory.

And here is the part that is easy to miss: many of the causes of death that appear again and again in our family trees simply stop appearing once vaccines become widespread. Not because people suddenly became braver. Or healthier. Or morally better.

But because we changed the environment in which these diseases could kill.

When prevention works well, something strange happens: people forget what it was preventing.

We forget child cemeteries.
We forget iron lungs.
We forget winters when families lost two or three children in a single season.

Genealogists are among the few people who still routinely encounter the pre-vaccine world, because we read its paperwork.

This conflict is not new in America, either.

Benjamin Franklin lost a young son to smallpox. He had wanted the boy inoculated. His wife had refused. Franklin later wrote of his regret with extraordinary bitterness. Even in the eighteenth century, Americans were already living this argument. And already paying its price.

This is not a story about politics.

It is a story about memory.

It is about whether we remember what kind of world our ancestors actually lived in or whether we let that world fade into comfortable abstraction.

As we approach America’s 250th anniversary, it’s worth asking what kind of nation we want to remember ourselves as. A nation is not only its ideals and its founding documents. It is also how many children lived to grow up. How many parents made it home. How many families were spared grief.

Our family trees are not just records of who belonged to us.

They are records of who was taken.

The dead cannot tell us what they would have chosen. But they can tell us what it cost when there was no protection.

And they do, quietly, patiently, on every page of our family history.

Our Christmas Miracle

Merry Christmas, dearest readers!

Christmas is a season of joy, wonder, and if you’re paying attention, quiet miracles. I have a holiday story to share that has just unfolded in my own family. Those of you who work in genealogy already understand that the strange, the coincidental, and the improbable often walk hand in hand with real life. Still, what I’m about to share feels like something more.

One of our adult children has always wanted to be a mother. For years, she prepared for a child she hoped would someday be hers, cross-stitching bibs, knitting booties, quilting blankets, and crafting tiny handmade treasures. She remained hopeful, positive, and forward-thinking throughout it all. As her mom, though, my heart often ached. No matter how old your child is, it’s painful to watch them work so hard for something that doesn’t seem to be coming.

I’ve written before about my Granny, my Croatian immigrant great-grandmother, who, in the late 1800s, made a pilgrimage from her small village of Dubranec to Marija Bistrica, a Roman Catholic shrine believed to be a site of miracles. When my husband and I visited the area years later, I was stunned by the distance she traveled. The terrain is mountainous, and for a woman of that era, the journey there and back would have been difficult and dangerous.

Yet Granny believed in miracles. She was hoping for a child who would live. According to my grandmother, Granny’s daughter, triplets had died. In truth, they were likely three separate pregnancies. English was their second language, and surviving records show two boys who died in different years. I suspect the third was a miscarriage.

While standing in that church during my visit, I lit a candle for my own child. It couldn’t hurt, right?

Last January, after modern medicine could not help her conceive, adoption became the next step. A consultation with a lawyer in May was discouraging. The message was blunt: if an adoption happened, and that was a very big if, it would likely take three to five years. Her age worked against her. International adoption was explored, but it was even more expensive and less promising. It all felt like a closed door.

Undaunted, she decided to become a foster mom. She was told she’d likely be placed with a teenager. Her response? That was fine. And if that young person someday became a parent, she would give them all the baby items she had lovingly made over the years. Generosity, it turns out, is another of her gifts.

She was approved as a foster mom the day before Thanksgiving and prepared a room for whoever might arrive. Then, last week, she received a call: would she be interested in a newborn? If so, she needed to attend an interview on 22 December. Of course she was interested but getting away from work was no small thing. In her profession, you don’t simply take the day off. With help from a few trusted colleagues, her schedule was carefully shifted so she could attend the meeting during her lunch hour.

She was told she would hear back the following day. Instead, four hours later, the phone rang. She was informed that she was a new mom.

The day she was selected came one day after my Granny’s birthdate. Go figure.

The next day, after paperwork, we met our newest family member. Our daughter named her after Granny, with a middle name that also carries deep family meaning another story for another time.

And yet, the coincidences continued.

I had never been inside this particular hospital before, but I knew it well. When we relocated from Florida, I had inexplicably chosen a hotel right next to it. Every time I needed to access the main highway, I turned into that hospital’s parking lot. Later, I realized it was the same hospital system my paternal grandfather had used when he lived in the city.

So there was a thread connecting my maternal and paternal lines but it didn’t end there.

When we entered the NICU, I noticed the baby’s whiteboard listed a very distinctive first name: the name of my husband’s maternal grandmother. I asked if that was the baby’s name. The nurse said no. One of the staff had simply thought of it, without knowing why, and wanted something to call her until an adoptive mom was chosen.

That name belonged to the woman who had, in many ways, raised my husband.

I don’t pretend to understand how all of this came together especially during a season known for wonder. I only know that we are profoundly grateful to have this strong little angel in our lives.

We are especially thankful for the biological mother, the DCS and NICU staff, and the community members who have stepped forward with support. If you’re so inclined, we would be grateful if you’d keep this little one in your prayers.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas.

Wrong Boat, Right Story: Cracking a Pilgrim Family Myth

Not all pilgrim stories wear black hats or buckle shoes. Some travel quietly through time in meeting minutes, migration maps, and a stray penciled “(Pilgrim)” on a lineage list. No dramatic claims, no grand family lore, just a quiet truth waiting patiently until the right record whispers at the right moment.

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful not only for the bold ancestors who stood at the prow of history, but also for the gentle ones who crossed oceans in faith and humility, leaving their legacies in ink and example rather than brass and ceremony.

For years, my husband’s Williams family cherished a tale that they were descended from a Pilgrim. The “proof” sat in a letter written in the 1960s by the family matriarch, Gertrude Honaker, who wrote that Balsora Dorval had belonged to both the DAR and a Mayflower-related society.[1]

There was only one hitch: no such membership could be found. Not with the DAR, not with the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, not in early Pilgrim lineage rolls.[2] A genealogical dead-end dressed in patriotic stationery.

Balsora, the daughter of John Hicks Williams and Catherine Jarvis was born 23 April 1821, on Long Island, New York, the eldest of ten.[3] She followed her family to Lansinghburgh, Rensselaer, New York and married Edward Dorval in 1845.[4] The couple eventually made their way to Chicago and then Toulon, Stark, Illinois.[5] She died in Toulon on 22 December 1907 and is buried there.[6] She lived a solid, steady American life. But as for those lineage memberships? Silence.

Still, I never let go of the thread. Family stories rarely spring from nothing; the facts just sometimes take the scenic route.

Then, while drafting sketches for my current genealogy project, Echoes of Brittania, I stumbled across a saved reference: The Lineages of Members of the National Society of Sons and Daughters of the Pilgrims, Vol. II. There, under membership no. 8308 for Della Ruthe Skates of Parma, Ohio, was a lineage tracing back to:

Dr. John Rodman II (Pilgrim)
(ca. 1653 – 10 Jul 1731)
m. Mary Scammon (ca. 1663 – 24 Feb 1748)

It cited Jones, Rodman Family Genealogy; History of Hocking Valley, Ohio.

And suddenly, the light came on.

Dr. Rodman wasn’t a Mayflower Pilgrim. He was a Quaker physician imprisoned in New Ross, County Wexford, Ireland for refusing to remove his hat in church.[7] He was banished to Barbadoes where he and wife Elizabeth, parentage unknown, raised their family. Two of their sons, John and Thomas, like their father was a physician; the brothers decided to relocate to Newport Rhode Island where John married second, Mary Scammon in 1682.[8] So the actual line runs: Dr. John Rodman -Thomas Rodman – Elizabeth Rodman m. Benjamin Hicks – Margaret Hicks m. Wilson Williams leading at last to the Williams family and to Balsora’s line.

When I think of Pilgrims, I think of the Mayflower voyage in 1620. I don’t picture a Quaker doctor arriving sixty-two years later by way of the Caribbean! But clearly, my definition and the definition beloved by late-1800s genealogists and patriotic club founders aren’t the same. Their scope was a bit more generous. That generosity was remembered by their great grand nieces.

So this Thanksgiving, as we’re passing around the sweet potatoes, I can finally share that I’ve solved the Pilgrim family mystery. Different ship, different year, different take on the meaning of “pilgrim.”

And here’s the delicious part: in all this, I had to laugh, because my research long ago found that the family does descend from an early Plymouth settler Robert Hicks, who arrived on the Fortune in 1621, just one year after the Mayflower.[9] Somehow, that piece drifted out of family memory while the Barbados Quaker got promoted to “Pilgrim.” It must have been the hat!

[1] Gertrude Honaker, Ancestors of the Cook Honaker Samuelson Families, family history letter written to Eileen Courtney, mid 1960s, shared with author in 2001

[2] Letter from Mrs. Thomas Gee Burkey, National Society Daughters of the American Revolution to Ellen C. Courtney, 9 Mar 1993, no record of Balsora’s membership.

[3] Findagrave.com, Memorial id 64646514, Balsora Williams Dorval (1821-1907), citing Toulon Cemetery, Toulon, Stark, Illinois, memorial maintained by Simmerly3, tombstone photo by Cindy Eberle.

Oakwood Cemetery Burial Card, John Hicks Williams and Catharine [Hicks] Williams, Lot 184, copy held by author. Balsora and her sister, Elizabeth Williams Son were transferred their parent’s burial plots.

Stark County, Illinois Personal and Statistical Particulars and Medical Certificate of Death, 1 Feb 1908, held by author. Place of birth Long Island, N.Y.

[4] 1850 U.S. federal census, Lansingburgh, Rensselaer, New York, population schedule, p. 2333, Line 24, Belsora Dorval, digital image; Ancestry.com: accessed 2 Nov 2025, image 27 of 139.

First Presbyterian Church of Lansingburgh, Rensselaer, New York, Marriages, Edward Dorval & Belsora Williams, 21 Apr 1845, digital image; members.tripod.com: accessed 8 Dec 2000.

[5] 1860 U.S. federal census, Chicago, Cook, Illinois, population schedule, p. 362, Line 35, B. Dorvol, digital image; Ancestry.com: accessed 2 Nov 2025, image 362 of 404.

1900 U.S. federal census, Toulon, Stark, Illinois, population schedule, Sheet 3B, Line 66, Balsora Dorvol, digital image; Ancestry.com: accessed 2 Nov 2025, image 6 of 28.

[6] Findagrave.com, Memorial id 64646514, Balsora Williams Dorval (1821-1907).

Stark County [IL] News, Mrs. B. Dorval, 24 Dec 1907, p. 10, col. 6.

[7] Fuller and Holmes, 1671, quoted in Irish Pedigrees, 377; see also Rutty’s History of the Quakers in Ireland (1751), 366.

[8] Newport freeman list, 6 May 1684.

U.S., New England marriages Prior to 1700, Mary Scammon & John Rodman, 25 Oct 1682, digital image; Ancestry.com: accessed 2 Nov 2025, image 647 of 1022. NOTE: 1^st wife Christiana Gibson likely did in Barbados.

[9] Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633, 3 vols. (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995), 2:924–26, “Robert Hicks” (origin London; Fortune, 1621; occupation fellmonger; freeman 1633; tax 1639; will 1647; children grouped by marriages; wife Margaret, maiden name unproven).

From Bards to Bard

Photo by a kind docent at Shakespeare’s Home, Stratford on Avon, August 2024.

We had just left the library, me, exhilarated from chasing an elusive 14th-century ancestor through a nest of old parish records; him, simply relieved to stand upright again after half an hour on the bottom shelves. He’d spent the morning handing me books like a dutiful squire and now looked as though he deserved a knighthood or, at the very least, a sturdy chair. Fortunately, Shakespeare’s schoolroom promised benches and history. Two things I never resist, and one he can usually nap through.

Inside, the air smelled of beeswax and old oak, the kind of room where you half expect to hear the scratch of quills and the snap of a tutor’s patience. A man dressed in full Elizabethan regalia was lecturing with theatrical gusto about young William’s schooling. My husband settled in contentedly, no doubt counting this as his rest stop on the Tudor trail.

Then came the story of how Shakespeare’s sister once disguised herself as a boy to attend lessons beside him, the first recorded case, our costumed instructor declared, of gender-bending for the sake of education. My husband leaned over, voice low and amused, “That would be your line.”

Of course I replied , I always reply. “Yes, it would.”

The tutor froze mid-sentence, eyes narrowing like an owl’s. “Would you care to share with the class, madam?”

Reader, I was forty years too old to be scolded and four hundred years too late to be sitting in Shakespeare’s classroom yet there I was, reprimanded under the same beams that once heard Hamlet’s first drafts forming in the back of a boy’s mind. My husband, naturally, looked saintly.

As the lecture continued, I couldn’t help smiling. The old Welsh bards would have understood words have a life of their own, and some of us were simply born to answer them, even in other people’s classrooms.

After my recent AI experience that I blogged about last week, it’s more important than ever to remember the power of words.