SERENDIPITY: the phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for
I
believe in genealogical serendipity -- it's happened to me more than
once. Today I'd like to take you on a trip back to the technologically
different days of the year 2000 when serendipity came to me in a big
way.
In 2000, there were no smart phones and no tablets. Most
people used desktop computers, as laptops were expensive. PDAs like my
Palm Pilot were more common and I had a pager. Remember pagers? If you
did have a laptop, internet and e-mail access from a hotel meant using a
slow dial-up connection. From our perspective in 2013, that seems like
the technology middle-ages!
That year, I spent a week in a hotel
in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in mid-December. Ice and snow turned driving into a
nightmare. Waking to six inches of snow one gloomy morning, I opted to
take a vacation day. The company computers were behaving nicely, and I had my
work laptop and pager and cell phone if the boss needed me to dial in
for a crisis.
How would I spend the next 16 hours? The vast
wasteland of daytime TV was not attractive, especially with the hotel's
limited channels. So I decided to trudge through personal e-mail folders
and do some clean up.
You know all those e-mails you plan to
read someday? The newsletters on crafting, genealogy, technology,
business, or home design. Everyone wants to send us newsletters and they
just pile up. I use filters on my e-mail -- behind the scenes Yahoo
looks at the subject or the sender and drops new email into folders for
me. I don't even see many newsletters unless I look at the folder.
That
day I decided to just start at the newest genealogy newsletter and go
back in time. I opened one, skimmed it, checked any interesting links,
then deleted it. Rinse and repeat. After just a few, I saw an item that
stopped me.
A gentleman named Jeff had created a website that was an electronic copy of an old family book on the Pefley
family. Hmmm. I had seen that name before. I looked at the family tree
that I carried in my Palm Pilot and there it was. A family member (a
collateral line) had married a Pefley. I did want to find the death and
burial information for the parents of Mary Hannah Bosseck Pefley.
These
books on a particular surname are very hit and miss, but I had time. That slow dial-up made the website unusable. I e-mailed Jeff and he kindly sent me a copy in Word format
right away.
Paydirt
I searched for the name Bosseck inside the book and was puzzled at the first find.
- [person]
663 -- Elizabeth Rettinger (dau. of No. 7) married ... Christian Peter
Bosseck (see No. 1424). Issue ... Mary Hannah Bosseck ... (Perhaps
others).
Wait a minute. Why is Elizabeth Rettinger in here as a daughter of someone and
where are all the other Bosseck children? I'm just looking for information on Mary
and her husband. I remember my utter bafflement. I searched for the next
match on Bosseck.
- [person] 1424 -- George Mangus Pefley (son of No. 1324) married ... Mary Hannah Bosseck ... (see No. 663) ...
My
head was spinning. I went back and forth between the two, the only
references to Bosseck in the book. Finally I took out a piece of paper
and started to draw a bit of a tree, following the son of ... and
daughter of ... links to parents and beyond.
The Tree Grows
When I reached the
top, I was amazed. I had five new generations to add to
my tree. I, myself, was a descendant of Nicholas Pefley, person number
one in the book. Mary had married her second cousin once removed!
I
had not been looking for anything other than where Mary had died so
that I could find her grave and maybe an obituary. I was looking simply
for the graves of her parents, my 4th great-grandparents.
Not
only did the book provide a place of death for Mary and five new
generations, it also yielded a Revolutionary war veteran (DAR-worthy)
and an understanding of the ethnic and religious roots of this Swiss-German branch of
my family, along with their migration patterns.
I visited Mary's grave in eastern Kansas the following year. The graves of her parents, my ancestors, are two markers away from hers.
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| Pefley photo courtesy of Julie Wollard Trout. Recollections digital kit by Joanne Brisebois Designs for Digital Scrapper (formerly Scrapper's Guide) | | |
The Cycle Continues
I
added Mary's husband's ancestors to my database, as well as my own
ancestors. That recently paid off. I was able to suggest this book to another person to further their research on one of George
Pefley's ancestors named Graybill.
Thanks to a miserable snow
day and a genealogy newsletter, serendipity brought me a book I would
likely have never looked at otherwise. And serendipity allowed me to
pass it on when I saw the name Graybill and the location Ladoga, Indiana, in the tree of another researcher.
Watch for those gifts -- I know the universe has some for each of us.
