Along this journey of tracing back my family tree and taking photos of all the cemeteries I've visited, I'm noticing more and more how the whole "6 degrees of separation" is really true, and not only in regards of friends. The theory states that "Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps."
Where I grew up everyone always joked about how we were all related. I don't think many of them really realized how very true that is. Maybe not first or even second cousins, but as I go back in time I'm finding more and more links between families that I had no idea were even remotely related.
Where I grew up everyone always joked about how we were all related. I don't think many of them really realized how very true that is. Maybe not first or even second cousins, but as I go back in time I'm finding more and more links between families that I had no idea were even remotely related.
I guess it's inevitable in a small community, even one that has grown into a small to medium sized town and the county that surrounds it. We have an interloper here and there that I'll come across a stone for and kind of scratch my head as I think "where the heck did this guy come from, he's not one of ours!" But for the most part, at some point, any family that has been in the area for a few generations is no doubt in some way related to the others that have been there just as long or longer.
As my own Patch of Gray tree on Ancestry grows and branches out, I often find myself spending a whole day just filling in names, dates, spouses, children of a husband of a 2nd cousin 7 times removed. I don't mind that they're not more closely related to me, I don't feel like I'm wasting my time in discovering their families and filling in their information, doing a little extra digging to find out some hidden truths, but yesterday it did give me pause and I made a decision.
Rather than just fill this information in on my own tree, which is fine and helpful for all, I decided to create a tree and name it Yarmouth County, NS, since it is growing far beyond my immediate family. I get a lot of my information from books such as Yarmouth, Nova Scotia: A Sequel to Campbell's History, plus various other historical texts, both online or in the library, and I do get some info from other people's trees or findagrave.com. The last two I have to be careful, as I'd encourage anyone else doing family research, as some (too many) take what they see on other trees as gospel and just copy it over to theirs, then someone else does the same and so on and so on until nobody is sure at all where the information even originated or if it's correct. And too often it is not.
I'm not giving up on Jesse ... he's elusive but I know he can be found, I find new lines of research all the time, but after a while it gets so frustrating that all I want to do is fill in names and dates of sure things.
I encourage anyone who views or uses the information they find on my Yarmouth County, NS tree to please let me know if you find any errors or have any additional information or photos that could be incorporated on the profiles. I'm always open to suggestions and would like to be sure that the information I use is as accurate as possible. Please - check it out!
