In June I had the pleasure of meeting two of my Bollenbacher cousins, we are fifth cousins once removed. I had never met any family on this paternal line and how the meeting came about is rather strange.
I’ve previously blogged and lectured about the benefits of using the Whova Conference app to meet a cousin from Germany, Gerhard Hoh. In the spring, Gerhard visited a small town near his home in Germany to interview a 96 year old resident who happened to be a Bollenbacher. He knew, from looking at my public online tree, that I had Bollenbacher lineage.
When Gerhard entered the woman’s home he noticed several photos on the wall and he inquired about them. They had been taken in the 1970s at a family reunion in Northeastern Indiana. Gerhard informed his hostess that he had met a cousin in that area last June who was also a Bollenbacher. The woman kindly provided Gerhard with the addresses of two cousins she had met when she attended the reunion and requested that I connect with them.
I was heading for Sweden the following day so I put off the letter writing until I returned in May. I provided information on how I had received their address and my email address. I received a snail mail response with their email address and a desire for us to meet in person. After several back and forth to find a convenient date, my husband and I made the one hour drive to my “new” cousin’s home.
We spent a lovely afternoon sharing genealogical finds but we were stymied on how we were related. I didn’t have them in my tree nor did they know anything about me, other than an odd coincidence. One of my cousins had brought her husband and he happened to be a farmer. I mentioned some of my other paternal lines and he asked for more information about my Leininger family. I told him the story of my immigrant three times great grandparents Jean “John” and Marie Marguerithe Gass Leininger who had built a home across Ohio-Indiana state lines in the 1840s. I also mentioned that Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) had farmed the adjoining farm. The farmer was surprised as most people don’t know who owned the land 175+ years ago. Turns out, the farmer has been working those fields for most of his adult life.
This was the first for me – meeting a person that was connected today to the old family homestead. I have gone to visit old city and country homes of my ancestors around the world to meet the current inhabitants but I’ve never met someone who just happened to be accompanying someone else that had a tie to my ancestral past.
I was able to hear that the wheat crop he had just sold, earliest in his whole career, had turned out well. My grandfather and father also grew wheat. I then shared that one of my adult kids had farmed wheat for the first time and on Father’s Day, threshed and milled it, then made a mug cake of it for my husband. That farming gene runs deep in my lines! Social media did the trick for me in connecting with my family’s past.
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