Fruitful Discoveries in the Lemons Tree

Today I've finally returned to my messages in Ancestry.com where I found that I had neglected a very interesting inquiry from a cousin. She and I share 15 centimorgans and we both have a few Lemons in our trees. Jane Lemons had been a name resting on a very short branch of my Taaffe tree. Our family lore told me she was an immigrant from Ireland. Some years ago I looked for a way to connect her in documents or in names of any nearby relations. I had even collected a little pile of twigs to throw against her brick wall.  Those twigs are represented by my ledger full of empty Ancestry searches and individual records of people with the Lemons surname (or similar) living in other parts of the US and Canada in the same decades. None of these twigs had helped to extend the story of our Jane Lemons in Arkansas. I imagined she had come to Arkansas alone before marrying or had ended up alone shortly after arriving.

​My new Ancestry.com correspondent, JB, has introduced me to the records for Jane's nearby Irish-born relations in the same community. In a second gift today, JB  has also made me aware of the research legacy built by my great aunt Mazie. My grandfather's younger sister, Mary Zerelda Cannon, self-published books to share her years of research about the families in and around her community of Foreman Arkansas. She already had a reputation in my somewhat-removed family for being an avid family historian. I didn't know she had interviewed cousins and artfully compiled the results. 

A shout out to a generous cousin!

I'm surely the one to blame that I hadn't known more until now. I only met my Aunt Mazie once at the age of about eleven when I was too young and shy to really build a lasting rapport.  And like my grandparents, my parents, my siblings, and my aunts and uncles, I moved away from my hometown as a young adult.  Now that my opportunity to know my aunt is long gone, I'm starting to ask my near cousins about the book that JB has introduced me to recently. It's called "So Now We Wear the Green" with more than 200 pages of stories, documented connections, and speculations to connect individuals. I'm in my early retirement years and I've recently lost the last near relative of my father's generation. So it is truly bittersweet to realize in equal measure that I am sad to arrive so late to my family's stories and that I am so happy to connect with related and generous researchers like JB.

My Lemons tree is blooming at the start of summer 2019. Thank you JB for the leads, I'm delighted by the number of names and documents that now extend my research diversion and that remind me of my tenacious aunt. Look for my documents in the next blog entry. 

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