Lose (Loose?) Ends

After an interval of some months, I wrote on Wednesday evening to a not-to-distant cousin, (either genealogically or geographically ... she's only a second cousin and lives in the London area).  By way of a 'catch-up', I listed some of the technical and technological upheavals that seem to have bedevilled my life this year.  Looking back after two days, I realise that the first of this chain had evaded my memory - having to replace my SatNav back in February - and that, had I delayed my e-mail until today, I could have added the need to replace my printer ... the complete exercise of selecting collecting and installing of which occupied the whole of yesterday morning.

It occurs to me that the fact of my writing the e-mail at all is a reflection on a far greater loss of ends.  I have written many times previously on this blog (the latest of which was here) about my great-uncle George and the family that he raised in Ireland towards the end of the nineteenth century.  He was the second in my great-grandfather's family of ten children and, as I think of my father's awareness or otherwise of his Irish cousins, I mustn't lose sight of George's older sister, the first of the family, who lived in Lancashire and married there before my grandfather's eighth birthday - a story for another day.

The cousin to whom I wrote this week is the granddaughter of my maternal grandfather's sister.  That family comprised eleven children: nine boys, of whom my grandfather was the eldest, and two girls, who were the second and third in the sequence.  This was the first of three second cousins I've discovered in this family in the last two years.  I've recently made contact with a grandson of the youngest brother, and last summer I discovered a granddaughter of the second son (i.e. fourth child), who has the unusual distinction of also being related to another distant branch of my family ... albeit only through a brother's marriage!

The trouble with those large families of past generations is that one end's children get involved with the other end's grandchildren ... like a constantly-running roundabout!

We genealogists certainly discover tangled webs ... although it's doubtful whether they were ever intended to deceive!  Robbie Burns would have had a field day!