(Hm, as a "clan", perhaps we should develop our own tartan or something?)Mima's coworker was able to get us the contact information for the other Zachary Selfon's mom and dad, so I sent off an e-mail on Tuesday night. Wednesday, I was amazed to be greeted with multiple Selfon e-mails, hearing directly from no less than four relatives, and learning of many more! The topper was a great picture of the other Zachary, his newborn sister, and his parents. (I'll ask them if it's okay for me to post it up on our blog.)
The fact that our branch of the Selfon tree hasn't had a girl in 50+ years was more than made up for by four girl cousins (and one boy) in my generation in the Philadelphia Selfon branch. I needed to start building up a family tree just to keep track of everyone; Zachary even already has several relatives in his generation (the other Zachary is about 2 1/2, has a newborn sister, and there's another newborn cousin in New York). If I'm keeping count correctly, among the various rediscovered relatives are at least 9 currently with the actual last name Selfon (many others have gotten married and taken on hopefully less mangle-able last names). The top fun and/or ironic twists thus far include:
- The 'other' Zachary Selfon, and his sister Ella Selfon (Ella was also on our list for girl names!)
- Multiple Selfons living quite close to my brother in the NY metropolitan area
- A Selfon who married a Scott from Seattle (!) and now lives in Los Angeles. (She actually ran across our old wedding registry while setting hers up, and was convinced they'd mixed up her maiden name with her now-husband's last name.)
My current working theory is that, in relation to my generation, our great-grandparents were brothers. If I understand kinship rules properly, I think that would make everyone in my generation a third cousin, and in my parents' generation a second cousin once removed from me.
Even though it's designed more for diagramming fancy business processes and such, Visio actually worked decently well for constructing a respectable family tree thing without having to shell out for crazy expensive custom software. Right now I've put together at least partial reconstructions of the two branches, we just need to figure out how to hook them together.
Saturday morning, Meh's library is having a book club program. Zachary and I are planning to go along, and if I'm feeling industrious, I know that Meh's library has access to the scanned-in turn of the century census records, so we could do a better job reconstructing the Selfons of that generation. Hooray for rediscovered family members!
2 comments:
I think some people also use geni.com for family tree stuff. You can link and share it all. It seems cool, but I don't really have enough family or enough energy to fill it out. But you, on the other hand . . . .
That site's pretty spiffy and easy to use, thanks for the link! The main challenge right now is all of the family tree fragments I've collected; it doesn't look like geni lets you start from multiple arbitrary points. But Selfons abound around the US, I'll post an update at some point with more stats!
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