This morning I opened my email account to a surprise set of contacts from an unknown cousin, three generations removed on the Donahue side. Our great-grandparents are cousins. This made me realize how incredibly monstrous the task of transferring all of my research to this site really is–so large, maybe unmanageable. I haven’t even gotten to the side of the family that this new contact belongs to!

The difficulty, as I’ve written about in a previous blog, is making the research make sense. Creating a narrative, sharing the story.In one of this distant cousin’s emails I read: “I believe that our families are connected.  My Great Grandmother was Anna Donahue.  She had at least 6 children and one of them was my Grandfather who was murdered after he had my mother.” What a story! This tragic incident written in a short, somewhat removed statement really sums up the problem of family research that I grapple with. That and every time I am contacted by another unknown family member, searching for their story I have to let out a sigh for the work I’ve decided to take on so casually.