Found Relatives!

My father, Edward Stewart (1930-1983), passed away due to lung cancer 26 years ago. I was 21 years old at the time and never had the opportunity to get to know my father as an adult. Dad was a quiet man and didn't talk much unless he had something to say. I didn't know much about his childhood, but I had heard at some point that he had a sister that was taken away by his mother when she was about 1 year old and he was around 10 or 11. He had several brothers he grew up with as well as 2 sisters and a brother from his father's second marriage. She was his step-mother but the only grandmother we knew on his side.

Over the years I've wondered about my father's birth mother and his sister and what ever happened to them. Mom and Dad never told us. So, October 25, 2009 with the resources available on the Internet, I decided to see what I could find out. I didn't know their names, so I did a search using my Dad's name and birthplace on Ancestry.com. I was amazed to find that without much work at all, I found my father's name in someone else's ancestry tree. Their branch dead-ended with my father's name which told me they also had no information about him. I could tell from some of the other names though that this was definitely someone in the family. As luck would have it, it wasn't just someone in the family, it was my first cousin Victor Ritchey, son of my father's missing sister! Within minutes, I had found my father's sister's name, her 3 son's names and my father's mother's name. Vic had done alot of research and had traced our family tree back for generations... but never had the information on my father and his family.

With a little more poking around, I found Vic's website and his Facebook page and saw a photo of him. I saw the family resemblance right away. I wrote him a message introducing myself, hoping he would be receptive to getting to know us and share some information about his mother and grandmother.

It wasn't long before I heard back from him, he shared photos, genealogy information and the stories he had heard about his grandmother taking his mother away from the rest of the family. We've connected on Facebook and I and my sisters have all gotten to know him a bit as well as Aunt Edna, my father's sister. She's 70 years old now and I am thrilled we found her. I think she was just as thrilled that we found her too. I shared all the information with Shelly and Karen as the emails and photos came and now we are all Facebook friends and hope to get to know each other better as well as meet some day before too long.

I think my dad would be very happy that we found each other. Mom said that anytime dad talked about his sister he would get teary eyed because he missed the relationship they never got to have.

Here are a few photos we received. After seeing my dad's mother, it's quite obvious who Karen looks like!

This is Vic, the cousin who did all the research that allowed me to find them. He's an artist so I'm guessing maybe that side of the family is where all us girls got our artistic abilities from.

This is my grandmother Alpha Mae Buchanan when she was young and then again with Vic (above) and one of his brother's Doug in 1961.


This is my Aunt Edna Deloris Stewart Ritchey in 1957 and a photo of her and her husband and sons, Victor, Doug & Stewart now.

Aunt Edna also has another sister from her mother named Janis who would be my father's half-sister. He also has his half-sisters Janice and Debbie and a half brother Patrick from his father & Mary. Unfortunately, other than a couple of times I contacted Janice, we've lost touch with all of them since he died. My father's other brothers, Lloyd, Bill & John have all passed away. I wish we had kept in contact with their families so we could know those cousins. It always makes me sad that losing dad meant losing his side of the family as well.

That's probably why I'm so happy to have this connection with Aunt Edna. It's also given me the opportunity to share with her some information about my father, her brother, that she never knew.

Many thanks to Vic for doing all that research on his family which allowed me to find them!

More photos of the rest of the family can be viewed here.

Walk in St. Augustine

Julian went camping with the Boy Scouts this weekend and we had actually planned on pulling the trailer to Faver-Dykes State Park and camping while he was with the boys. Unfortunately, it rained so much that the park closed due to flooding and our plans were canceled. The Boy Scouts ended up going to a different camp and we decided not to try to make new reservations so we stayed home.

It was a beautiful day today and I've been cooped up in the house sick for a few days so I was ready to at least get outside for awhile. I wanted to head down to St. Augustine to walk around, take photos and just enjoy the beautiful day with Tim. We got lucky and found there was a festival going on, so we got to walk around and look and some arts and crafts there and then we headed for a walk.

I wanted to take some photos of the 208 foot Great Cross and the surrounding grounds. Unfortunately, even though we saw a bunch of people walking in the grounds, there were chains and gates in the places we tried to get through that said "no trespassing" so we didn't. I got a few shots from where we could. We'll have to go back another time and try again to see everything.

It was a nice walk, a beautiful day but quite windy. We need to do stuff like this more often rather than sitting at home. It was nice to just spend time alone together. The rest of the photos I took can be viewed in our Picasa album here.