{"id":2625,"date":"2023-10-21T12:23:22","date_gmt":"2023-10-21T12:23:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/?p=2625"},"modified":"2023-10-21T12:23:23","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T12:23:23","slug":"creepy-october-a-website-connection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/?p=2625","title":{"rendered":"Creepy October – A Website Connection"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Courtesy of Adobestock.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I had just returned from traveling to Croatia in April when I received the email below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hello,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My name is [  ]. I am a Family History consultant. For a few years I have been trying to find the parentage of Joseph Emory DeLong 1814, married to Caroline Patterson about 1844 in Portage, Livingston New York. Joseph had a son named John, before Caroline, with Meritheue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Could I ask, have you heard of any of these names? Joseph was a Blacksmith, as were his sons with Caroline. John died in the civil war. his mother’s name is unusual but I have not found anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I came across this website and to a shot in the dark to enquire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Definitely, this was a shot in the dark and I was initially confused. The email came to my website email address and not through one of my online tree messages. I hadn\u2019t recalled writing about anyone named DeLong on my blog and the subject of the email, \u201cI have a question about someone in Nunda.\u201d was even more intriguing because I knew where Nunda was located, having written a report last year for a client. That wasn\u2019t anywhere on my website, either. I thought maybe the client had given my email to the writer but no, the message said it was from my website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went to the website and looked for a blog I had written about the DeLong family. Nada. I had written about the Long family but they were from Indiana. The name nagged at me so I went back to the research report I had done in 2022 for the Nunda location but no DeLongs were there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where had I heard that name? I\u2019m good at remembering surnames from years of researching and I knew something about this name but I couldn\u2019t place what it was. I turned to my Ancestry.com personal tree and discovered that I did, indeed, have a DeLong in my tree. I hadn\u2019t researched her, however, as she had married into my husband\u2019s Harbaugh family. Here\u2019s where it gets weird\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Ohio, she relocated with her parents to the small rural Indiana county where I now live, as did her soon-to-be husband who I had extensively researched because he was part of a surname study I had done in the early 2000s. I didn\u2019t recall he had lived in my current county. They married in the courthouse less than 5 minutes from where I live. Gave me the eebie jeebies!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did this individual take such a wild shot at emailing me about a name that I didn\u2019t have on my blog and I was able to connect the unique surname to someone in my personal family tree that just happened to live in the community I just moved to? The frequency of that surname in the U.S. is 1:13,755. I have no idea why the writer connected to me but her shot in the dark had a great aim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had just returned from traveling to Croatia in April when I received the email below: Hello, My name is [  ]. I am a Family History consultant. For a few years I have been trying to find the parentage of Joseph Emory DeLong 1814, married to Caroline Patterson about 1844 in Portage, Livingston New … Continue reading “Creepy October – A Website Connection”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1129,1128,358,750],"class_list":["post-2625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-stories","tag-dekalb-county-indiana","tag-delong","tag-email","tag-new-york"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2627,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2625\/revisions\/2627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogyatheart.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}