It's a Small World After All

The world is growing smaller. Finding connections with people is easier than ever, and today that was confirmed in the genealogy world again. My dad has a scrapbook of my great-grandmother's. I hadn't seen it until this weekend, but when I found it I spent hours reading it's pages and then photographing the contents.

My great-grandmother had cut out of the newspapers any article that was of interest to her - be it a relative who was getting married, or an acquaintance that was in the war, or just an article that showed the life and times of Orange County.

I took pictures of everything and hoped that I would be able to find the people on familysearch.org that I was not related to and post those articles there so others could get a hold of them. Several of the articles that were cut out were about a William O. Hart, a publisher for an Orange County newspaper, who died in a plane crash. Tragically, his son was killed the very next day on the way to the funeral.

I searched for this William Hart on familysearch.org and noticed that on his page someone had recently updated the information. There was an email address too so I emailed him directly the records I had in case he was interested. It turns out William Hart was his grandfather, and through a little more correspondence, we discovered his dad and my grandmother were in the same year of school at Olive Elementary in Orange County, CA . That got me excited, because I had these two pictures:

Olive Elementary School 3-4th grade classes, 1930.
My grandmother, Bernice, is sitting to the right of the teacher.
She was in the 3rd grade in this picture.

Olive Elementary School 3-4th grade classes, 1931
My grandmother, Bernice, is standing in the middle row, 3rd from the right.
She is in the fourth grade.

Sure enough his dad was in both of them. But the coolest part . . .  he sent me this one in return!!!! His dad is to the right of the teacher on the back row, and my grandma is the first little girl on the right bottom row. Now I have the 3rd, 4th and 6th grade pictures of my grandma!

In 1933 Bernice would be in the 6th grade. She is the first girl on the right bottom row.

I called my grandma, of course, and she remembers this Ross McClintock well. They had gone to school with each other from the 1st grade up until college and he even would drive her home from college on occasion. She described him as really good looking and all the girl's liked him, but very nice and a good friend to her.

 I value genealogical records and if someone had information about my family that they didn't know what to do with I'd hope they would try to find someone who might need it or want it. We can do that now so much easier through familysearch.org and ancestry.com or through blogging, facebook, twitter, etc. Sharing has become my favorite part of family history work, and it makes me realize that it really is "a small world after all".