Family Secrets

A couple weeks ago, I was contacted by someone who wanted to know details of someone on my family tree. I am one of a few people in my family to do genealogy for the family. It is a hobby that I enjoy and it has given me a good vehicle to ask about family stories and connections. It has been a bond I share with my Aunt Brenda, who has put far more work than I have on it, and most of what I have came from her work.

An area where the work has been mostly mine, is with Shelly's family. There are people in her family who have done some work on the family tree, but I haven't had the access to their work in anywhere near the same fashion I have with my Aunt. So, people using ancestry.com to find information on the Smith family will often go to my Aunt or the handful of others doing this work, but people looking for information on the Kiesters of Wollesens will contact me. This was just such a case.

I am always excited when I get a contact asking for nformation on someone I have done some research on, it pretty much always means, even if in a distant way, we are related. This was no different, this person identified themselves as the wife of the son of Violante Olsen. You wouldn't know this, but this is a problem.

I didn't know Vi, as they called her, but this Shelly's grandmother. I do, though, know all of Vi's children and she does have a son. The problem is Ted's wife, Ruth, does not do genealogy, I am fairly certain. If she does, she has been awfully stingy with this bit of knowledge un the face of my questions. So, I'm certain the person I had just got a message from was not her. Violante, though, is not exactly a common name.

For those of you not putting this together, let me layout the scenarios of how this could be, based on the frantic texts and phone calls that passed between my wife and I. Perhaps Uncle Ted has had a far more wild life Pathan we imagined, and I am talking to his second wife. Or, maybe it was his Mother who had kept a family secret. A son no one knew existed. Or maybe this was Ruth or some other explanation. As you can imagine, the calls were going out. Houston, we have a problem.

I wrote the inquirer. Shelly called her Aunt and her Mom. We were stumped.

A couple hours later, we got our answer. As it turns out, in Shelly's family, the name Violante was not as rare as we suspected. Vi's mother, Bertha, had a brother George. Quick note, they seem to be much better at finding names for the men in this part of her family. Anyway, George married a Violante. This Violante had given her name not only to Shelly's Grandmother, but also a daughter of her own. It was the wife of this Violante's son I was writing back a forth with. That plus a little name confusion and we almost start a family scandal.

Once it was all worked out, we had a little chuckle and talked about what we knew of the family back then. I now have information on a whole part of the family I didn't know anything about before.