He killed Sebastian!

So Saturday is going to be rainy and cold. Ok. Got it. No biggie, it's that time of year. Oh and it's possible there could be a few flakes of snow mixed in. OK, again no biggie.

So do you really need THIS as your lead story? Hardly.

I hear ya! Here in the OC if there is a chance of drizzle, the weather report on the news is called "Storm Watch, 2011" (insert current year). The media will always "Puff up Fluff" to make a headline.....

Snowmageddon!!!!

Heh. You westies slay me.

We always say that if it snowed in LA, they'd all run outside with thier straws to snort it up!

That, and we don't trust air that we can't see. We like ours chunky style....

I have "Battle Hymn of the Republic" going through my head... Madeline Kahn's Young Frankenstein version.

So I added two new long-lost relatives this week.

I'd been doing genealogy research for months on the specific issue of my dad's half-brother and sister. (Been doing the genealogy thing in general for a couple years, but the major project was trying to find his siblings, if still alive, because they're 20 years older than him and therefore time would be of the essence, if not too late already). Well, a few months ago I found out that his half-sister passed away a few decades ago. His brother was much harder to find, because the info I could find turned up a rather strange name, that matched their mom's surname, so I wasn't sure it was correct.
Turns out it was. But I was still having trouble finding info on the guy beyond a 1930 census result.

Something came up this week, when a random stranger responded to a post I'd placed on a genealogy forum, with some extremely helpful information, including the brother changing his name, the fact that he was alive in 2009, and where he was living (Hana, Maui, of all places!)

Tonight, my dad called information, got the number and spoke for an hour to the brother he'd been searching for for DECADES. Still alive, though 90 years old. And the crazy thing is, we've BEEN to Hana... hard to believe we could have walked right past him and never known! (Apparently he hangs out at the Hasegawa Gen. Store, so it's entirely possible we would have!)

In other news, my oldest brother finally got in touch with his 25 year old daughter. Long story, but basically she reached out to him like 10 years ago, but to our knowledge, he hadn't responded. And suddenly this week of all weeks, he reached back.

So... I have a new uncle and niece! How 'bout that?

That's pretty awesome!

I need to pick up where my dad left off. A cousin did some in-depth [for the time] research years ago. Most of our records were destroyed during WWII but this cousin worked for the government and had friends in very, very high places in both domestic and foreign governments and was able to find some more stuff and it's all compiled into a family tree printed out on a dot-matrix printer.

Problem is, my dad doesn't seem to think that we'll ever find more than what the cousin discovered in the late 80s-early 90s because of this government connection turning up all he could. Um, that's where networking and technology will come in to play. You never know who has what information from their parents, grand parents, great-great grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc...and how it will all fit together. Our "very small" family could be much larger.

Cindy, what forums do you use? I am inherently against Ancestry because of their LDS connection but it seems that most people use it and it may be the path of least resistance to finding more information. I don't really care if they baptize posthumously. It's ceremony I don't believe will change anything over a name on a piece of paper. I just don't want to give money to them if I can avoid it.