Monday, July 23, 2007

A new-found cousin!

About a month ago I was contacted by a descendant of Elzora Mary Shuder Long Davis. Elzora was also known as Mary, Dora, and Zora. Anyway, Elzora is the sister of my grandmother, Elsie Shuder Wiseman (my Dad's mother). My new-found cousin, a great-grandaughter of Elzora, is coming to visit me and my first cousin Caroline on Friday. Cousin Caroline is the one who has done the research on this line, back in the late 1970's and early 1980's (before I got "into" genealogy) so I've been going through her files that I copied about 10 years ago. Those files have just been sitting there waiting for me to get to them, I've looked through them a couple of times, but never really did anything with them. . . Guess it's about time. It's just that I'd rather spend my time researching my lines that haven't been worked on rather than inputting data that someone else has found. I've got a couple of lines that have had books published on them and while I find it interesting to read the books and learn about those families, for some reason they just don't mean as much to me (gasp, gasp, we're not supposed to have favorites are we?). I think it is because I personally haven't invested so much time or resources in them.

I never knew Dad's mother, Elsie. She died in a house fire in 1926 when my Dad was two years old. I didn't know his father either, Charlie died in 1943, a couple years before I was born. I've been told many times that I resemble Elsie, but I've never seen a good picture of her to be able to tell whether I do or not. With the permission of Cousin Caroline, I'll be posting some of the information she has gathered on the Shuder/Schuder and allied families (Huntsicker, Lavering, Long, and Stoever). We actually connect to the Shuders in two ways - it gets a bit confusing but does cut down on the number of ancestors that need to be researched!

No comments: