After I canceled my Ancestry.com subscription, I signed up for FamilySearch, a similar site run by the Mormon Church, which is very big into genealogy. And for free! My very favorite price point! After putting in the information you know about your family, they make it very easy to trace your relatives back many generations. Sometimes I get e-mails from FamilySearch with interesting tidbits. Yesterday, I received one telling me to sign in to find out about my very famous relatives. And so I learned that I am related to Benjamin Franklin (1st cousin 9 times removed), Abraham Lincoln (6th cousin 5 times removed), George Washington (7th cousin, 6 times removed), and even Martha Washington (7th cousin, 6 times removed). I am also related to Franklin Roosevelt, Lucille Ball, Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Princess Diana, and Muhammad Ali. Yes! Muhammad Ali! And they show you who your common ancestors were, usually a couple from around the 1600s or so, and display two side-by-side lineages leading from this couple directly to you and your famous relative. And what does this all mean? It means that there are millions of people out there who are very remotely related to each other. Not directly, of course, but I guess the point is that we are all more or less family. But very distantly. Which is very warm and fuzzy and all that, but does not help me identify photographs of my direct descendants that I have puzzled over for years. For example, I think but am not 100% sure that the man in the photograph on the left is Alexander Nelson, my great great grandfather, in front of his house in Clear Lake, Iowa.
Sadly, everyone who could tell me who all the people are in my old mystery photographs are dead. And so my advice to everyone out there is to make sure you sit your parents, grandparents and other relatives down in a room, against their will if necessary, and have them write down on the back who the hell is in each of those photographs, and the date they were taken, before it is too late. And why do I think the previous photograph was Alexander Nelson, my great great grandfather? Because there is also a photograph of my Grandfather and Grandmother Hoyt, as seen on the right, taken in front of what looks like the same house, and with the same blue tint, which I believe is called cyanotype photography, a 19th Century process. My Grandfather Hoyt was raised in Clear Lake, Iowa by his mother Sophie Nelson, after her husband Nelson S. Hoyt died at a young age. She remarried, but divorced her second husband, and so raised my grandfather and other children in her parent's home, which my grandfather and grandmother frequently visited from Chicago, where they had settled. A later photo showed my father as a little boy in front of that same house, and he told me it was taken in Clear Lake. As for the many, many other old photographs I have that are still unidentified, there is little hope of learning anything about them. Sad.
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