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That was good.
Shaman, you never fail to entertain!
Thanks. Just for that, I'll give you a bonus. KYHillChick and I have what appears to be extremely divergent genetic backgrounds. She's from a holler on KY/TN border. Half of my genes come from Marburg, Germany and we basically sat there selling salt since Roman times. However, there are some wild intersections.
To begin with, it was after one of our first dates that we discovered our mothers had the same maiden name. Yikes. I called Mom, the family expert on such things, and figured out the only relative unaccounted-for was a brother of my Great Great Grandfather who did not come back from the Civil War. He wasn't lost; he just didn't want to come home. Everyone else was well documented and had attended family reunions. This was worth a sigh of relief. However, the intersections have kept on coming.
'HillChick's father's kin, the Balls, come from the Potomac Tidewater. George Washington's mother was a Ball. It turns out I had a mess of kin on my mother's side (Shreve) that came from there early on. The clans intermarried before 'HillChick's progenitor decided to go through the Gap and start over.
I mentioned Shreve. HillChick's Mom's kin came from around New Madrid, MO. They were French trappers and one of them married into Tecumseh's immediate circle of kin. After the big quake, Captain Henry Miller Shreve was operating his new-fangled steamboat and managed to land at New Madrid. He liked the place so much, that he stayed and did the surveying for the streets. You guessed it. D'Masionvilles and Shreves connected. They're still down there. KYHillChick's Mom had grandparents that followed logging camps for work and eventually made it to the hollers of the Big South Fork region. Her Mom was born in the camp at Barthel in McCreary County, KY.
But it doesn't end there. In fact, most of the intersections come from obscure branches of our families that were original Dutch settlers of New York. Those clans gradually moved out into more rural parts, but not before leaving a tangled web of cousins throughout the mid-Atlantic region. One of them settled somewhere down south (I think North Carolina). His wife was taken in an Indian raid and eventually sold to Tecumseh. When I asked 'HillChick's mother what her background was, she said she didn't know much, but did know that there was a little Dutch in there somewhere. At the time, I had no idea that I was talking to a cousin.
The bottom line in all this is that even if your family history on this continent is not all that long, there are going to be threads that bind you to every other living American.
Update: KYHillChick got up and I told her about this. She says she's documented 6 intersections of our trees going back to the 17th Century here on this side of the pond. That's six times we've ended up being cousins by one way of figuring or the other. She believes that number could easily double as she unwinds all the early New England entaglements.