Finding Cousins

My sister Heather has been commenting that I spend too much of my research time on dead sources when we have plenty of living cousins to find. She is right of course that I have almost no focus on living relatives. This is mostly due to how proliferative my 'Wismer' family has been up in Canada. Cousins upon cousins.

After the Leitzke, Neitzke debacle last week I am slightly more interested in living relatives than I have been in the past. As a change I ended up diving into the Boussey (Boissy) line of my Maternal Grandfather's tree. This would be the famous 'Fillies du Roi' decendency for which I have considered putting in a application to the society. A lot of my data has come from a user named 'AlyceBoussy' on Ancestry and I was curious enough to track her line from our common ancestor down.

It was fairly exciting to see that for the most part she was in a similar family design as I was with one or two families marrying siblings doubling our genetic comparisons. Closer however to recent I find that while her Father was predominantly french he married a lovely Italian woman. Following my own tree you have a predominately French woman marrying a Welshman. The difference that these  derivatives might make was tantalizing. I began to wonder whether she would have a interest in conversing with me.

So as I found Alyce's information I found that she had unfortunately passed away about 4 years ago and the family had not taken down her work. Four years is when I began doing research and so I missed a chance to reach out to a cousin I didn't know I had and find a connection that I am missing to French culture. This is especially disheartening since it is my Grandfather's family that I have little to no knowledge of.  His mother had been a Boussey and so I am grateful to Alyce's family for not taking down her work. Yet here I sit still missing my contacts as well from the Jones family line for most of my Grandfather's brothers: Murray, Floyd, Henry, & Ralph all predeceased him. After my grandfather's death the families separated and the 'Jones & Sons, LTD' was dissolved.

As of now I have placed in over 1700 unique people into my tree and most of those in the past week are cousins that I am no longer willing to miss out on. Perhaps I will find the secret to the Jones' in the old reunion papers that my Grandmother Lucienna has sent to me through my mother.