Hi, Everyone,
A very exciting time was had on Saturday - though I must credit the initial contact being on Genesconnected - when my mother and I travelled a couple of miles across town to meet three generations of a family with same GURNER name as my mother's.
My family had originated in the small village of Ickleton, about 10 miles south of Cambridge, and had stayed there from at least the 16th C until the 19thC when London and Australia beckoned. This other branch of the family had simply moved in the 17thC to the nearby villages and thence eventually to Cambridge itself.
After much comparing of notes and sources and trees we realised that our common ancestor was 11 generations back for us, and 13 generations backwards for them, but the two enormous pieces fitted perfectly together; it's just that I had never researched certain branches of the family.
What was remarkable was to see the painstaking research that our new-found family members had put into individuals who were simply names in records and archives to them, but we could have told them all about them, as details about them were within - certainly my mother's - living memory. The only things they had got slightly wrong were the actual forenames these family members liked to be called by, but only if you knew them would you know the correct forenames they used.
Sometimes things like this happen in family history, but not very often, as we all know. Now we're frantically swapping books and artefacts and colouring in lots of lovely detail around people who were just names on the tree...
keith
