Week 20: Cousin Bait – Why I Write This Blog

I began this blog in 2011 to honor the southern roots of my grandmother, Pansy Louise Lancaster, and have a place to tell the stories of her family.

Another motivation for writing blog posts is hoping that cousins will find my posts and contact me. This has happened several times, but not as much as I had hoped.

I heard from a Hutson cousin and he has done tremendous research, taking the family back many generations. He formed a Hutson Family Facebook page where other members of his immediate family have also joined and shared photos. He is related to me through my 4x-great-grandfather, Robert Hutson (1821-????).

I also heard from Loveless cousins, some of whom live in Texas and others in Arkansas. These are descendants of Ebenezer Loveless (1851-1929).

I have been contacted by some Lancaster cousins, who are descendants of George W Lancaster (1839-1919). One descendant helped me discover what had happened to his wife, Martha Jane Polly (1855-1932), who I had thought died. This researcher was a descendant of one of the younger children. The oldest child, William Carl, stayed in Texas but I had no idea what had happened to the rest of the five children. It turns out that George and Martha divorced, she remarried, and they all moved to the Central Valley in California. We had great fun emailing back and forth with our discoveries in the early 2000s, when things where just coming online.

All of this happened because I put myself out there. I started with surname email lists, surname message boards, and Rootsweb World Connect, long before I began blogging. I wished I had kept better track of what I did and who I corresponded with. Perhaps I have records in my paper files. If so, I should either digitize them or record the correspondence in some kind of log so I have records of the correspondence at my fingertips. I’m afraid that most were lost when I changed from AOL to using Thunderbird to finally settling on Gmail. Each change resulted in loss of saved emails. I will likely have only those email records that I printed out.

Still, I am thankful for every time I have made a connection with a cousin.

Although I don't know what bait my grandfather used,
he was pretty good at catching catfish from Clear Lake

This is my fourth year working on this year-long 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow. I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails into the Past. I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways.


Copyright © 2021 by Lisa S. Gorrell, Mam-ma's Southern Family, All rights reserved.

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