Keeping In Touch with the Cousins
Editor’s Note: Joe’s research mailing list is extraordinary, and I remarked that he has kept up with quite a crowd of cousins near and distant. Joe explains that once his research into the ancestors reached a threshold where he was not advancing much, he broadened out and began collecting information down to the modern generation, building a database of names, which brought him into contact with many cousins. Some were reluctant, concerned about privacy, and a couple swore him to secrecy about publishing anything on the internet. So the family trees Joe has posted online stop at his parents’ generation and show nothing about living cousins and their families.
Transcript
Speakers: WJB — William J. Bowe; JH — Joseph Hart. Transcribed from the recording; punctuation added and obvious mis-hearings corrected.
WJB: So you have kept up, I can see, if only from this extraordinary mailing list that you have compiled in your research over the years. You’ve kept up with quite a crowd of cousins near and distant.
JH: I think so. I don’t keep in touch with everybody like I probably did at one time when I was maybe more into researching the cousins and kind of building a database with names and information. And so once my initial research kind of met a certain threshold, and I wasn’t advancing much to research the ancestors, I started to broaden out and started to collect information from down to the modern generation. And so that brought me into contact with a lot of cousins, because I wanted to know the names of their children and that kind of thing. And so some of the cousins were a little reluctant to give me that information because they were concerned about privacy and some other things. So I was sworn to secrecy by at least a couple of cousins that I would not publish any of the information that they were giving me on the internet. And of course, they were probably wise to swear me to secrecy. So the information I gave you, some other information that I’ve used for family tree information that I’ve posted on the internet in a couple of different ways, I bring it down to the generations like my father and mother’s generation. So I’m not showing any information about living cousins and their families, and so on.
