Yet another phone call

When I returned from Israel, I called my father, Manuel Thompson (z"l) to ask him if he could tell me how the two cousins who married each other were related. He was a sweet and funny man, but not very accurate. "They are cousins of my father's," was his reply. Well, that much I already knew. He told me to contact another relative, who sent me of to another, and another, until finally my cousin Rena provided me with a very detailed tree of a large part of the family (I am eternally grateful to her!)

(An aside: when doing genealogical research, you can come up with unusual and confusing results. Example, the above-mentioned Rena is related to me as her maternal grandfather Wolfe and my paternal great grandmother Chashka were siblings. But she is also first cousins (on her father's side) with a woman who is my father's first cousin on his MOTHER's side. Maybe I will draw some charts to make things clearer...)

Sometime later, I met another granddaughter of Wolfe's on a visit to Toronto. She was a lovely woman, who greeted me with warmth and hospitality in her home. She suggested we call yet another cousin, another of Wolfe's granddaughters. Estelle, whom we called, had been very close to my father, and at the end of our converstaion we were both in tears as if we had been close friends, even though this was the first time we had ever spoken to each other. Estelle asked me if I had found the family of "Aunt Fanny Secon". Well, I certainly wasn't even LOOKING for Aunt Fanny, as I never would have known about the name Secon. And it was this bit of information which caused me to rethink my original model of the family tree. And I will tell you about it in the next post.