52 Ancestors challenge Week 12 "Same"

[dragonfly]

Back before the internet was useful for genealogy research, I was in college with friends who were largely uninterested in genealogy, though I was, and had been since I was a small child. Knowing my interest, one friend, N, mentioned that her grandfather had done a careful recreation of all his lines back to when they weren't in the U.S. anymore. He had printed it up in manuscript form and given a copy to all his grandchildren. She had hers in the back of a closet, and would I like to see it? Yes, of course I would! I plunked down happily with this ream-sized printout and flipped through the pages, noting how he formatted things (for future reference when I might want to do the same thing). I found at the back, he had included an index of all surnames and what pages they could be found on. One name caught my eye--Washburn. In an indent, he included relevant first names and dates. The earliest Washburn in the manuscript was John Washburn. Srsly? John Washburn with a date in the 1600s, in Massachusetts? Could this be my John Washburn who was the first "Secretary" of Plymouth Colony? I flipped eagerly to the appropriate page, and found that yes it was the same guy.

This kind of connection is made fairly casually nowadays, through sites like AncestryDNA or FamilyTreeDNA, or GEDmatch.com. But at the time, it was SO exciting! I, of course, had to pour over my friend's manuscript to calculate exactly how we were related (again, something computers do for us in seconds) and triumphantly announced that we were 9th cousins twice removed. She was politely pleased, but I was over the moon. It made my day. I could look at her with new eyes--she's family!

Decades later I have a large ancestry.com tree filled in and one stray line still dangles down from John Washburn, connecting me to N. It was my first genealogy experience of SAME!!