Just Incredible!!

When I began my blog a few months ago, I would have never, ever expected what happened to me yesterday.

I was looking through the comments which had been added, and one of them was from a lady who lives only a few minutes away from me in a neighboring suburb. 

Last November I wrote an entry about my visit to Othmarsingen, the little town in Switzerland where my great-grandmother was born.  This lady came upon my blog when she was searching for pictures of Othmarsingen.  She has done some research on her own family genealogy, and when she read my entry she was flabbergasted.  I had written about my great-grandmother, Susan Marti, and how, when she was a little girl, the family had emigrated from Switzerland to find employment in the sandstone quarries of Berea, Ohio.  The lady realized that her great-grandfather, Jacob Marti, was the brother of Susan!

In her comment, she gave me her e-mail address so that I could contact her.  (For privacy, I have since deleted her comment).  We have already exchanged e-mails. All the details of her family history match the research that I have done. We are definitely third cousins!  I knew that Susan's siblings had children, and I often wondered if there were some cousins still living in the area.  Well, thanks to my blog, I have found one.  My new-found cousin even told me where our great-great grandparents lived when they arrived in Berea... a house that I have passed a thousand times without knowing its place in my family history.

I haven't done much work on my genealogy for a couple years, but I need to sort through my research.  We plan on meeting sometime in March, and I'm sure that we will be exchanging a lot of information.

 

The church in Othmarsingen, Switerland