Yesterday...

...I was pleased to receive an email from Ancestry.com. A very distant cousin's boyfriend kindly took my cousin's information and put together a family tree, and invited me to look at it via the Internet. What did we ever do before the Internet?

The family tree focused on the Steen family of Monroe county, Kentucky, and I was able to update my information. The Steens are cousins from the Keen side. The cousin and I are actually 7th cousins - our common ancestors are Matthias Keen and his wife of Virginia. Their daughter married a Copas, and their daughter married a Steen. My great grandfather was also a Keen.

This lit a little fire under me and I spent some quality time gathering Copas family members from Monroe county, Kentucky, off the IGI. I decided to take all of them and put them in my files. This is a project I'm still working on and proves to be very fun, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

Last Tuesday night, I finished my first run-through with PAF Insight (speaking of "what did we ever do before..."). I have quite a few people in my PAF file and found it necessary to run them through, one letter of the alphabet at a time. This last Tuesday, I finished with the T, U, V, W, X, Y & Z surnames. Now I can start running them through again next week, but I'm happy to have the Copas project to work on as well.

I think I'll start doing more of the surname/locality gathering. When there's a surname that's not common - Dysart comes to mind - and they all seem to be gathered in one place, I'm just gonna grab all of them. We're all related somehow, I'm sure.