Cousin Bait. It's How I Roll.

Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archives
Photographer: Flip Schulke 1930-2008

I received a most interesting email about a week and a half ago from a maternal cousin, Chip.  He said that he stumbled upon my website or my blog (I can't remember which ... mainly because I was so excited that someone was actually reading it!).  Sorry, I digress.  Anyway, he saw my post about my great grandfather (his grandfather) Harold John Crowe, Sr.  He sent me an email and says that he, too, has done some genealogy research.  I almost fainted.  Seriously.

Fast forward 6 days and several emails.  We talked on the phone for over 2 hours and Chip shared some wonderful stories that he had heard from his dad (my grandmother's brother) about the family, growing up, being in World War II, and other little tidbits (the stuff you don't find in the archives and libraries).  It literally took a thunderstorm knocking the power out to get us off the phone.  I'd say I hooked a big 'un!

I am now working on getting all my information up on WikiTree so we can collaborate with 2 other cousins.

There's a bit of a learning curve for me with all the HTML and whatnot, but my first attempt at an ancestor profile can be found here.  Okay, apparently the learning curve is a little bigger than I thought.  I made his profile public, but the actual public view is not what I saw when I edited it.  In any case, There are some photos and a biography and sources and everything.  It's pretty cool.  I hope it shows up eventually.

Here's a screen shot:

That took me about 1-1/2 hours to create.  Mainly because I had no clue what I was doing, and a lot of it was trial and error.  To me, the coolest (and most difficult) thing was adding the sources so they would show up as footnotes.  After I got the hang of it, I figured out the easiest thing is to edit everything in a Word document, add the HTML, then copy and paste it onto the profile.

I learned a couple of very important lessons from this.  (1) People are reading your blogs - even when you think they aren't.  You never know when a cousin will stumble upon what you've posted and make contact with you; and (2) I need to learn HTML.

Who knows?  Maybe I'll do something super fancy with it when I figure out what I'm doing.