Madeleine your 4 part series on the Clough family was great and looks like it has been well received. Thanks for your contributions and I will look forward to more from you soon.

As you can see from the above chart our stats for this blog are very modest, yet they have been a means of extending my personal family connections.

Growing up I had exactly the same number of siblings as first cousins (3), while my husband had so many first cousins he barely knew their names. All my cousins were guys, the two older ones were about the age of my older brother and sister and the other was a couple of years younger then myself. They were on my mother’s side. My  Dad’s sister never had children and neither did his Aunts. So most of our 2nd cousins (on the Dougherty side) were back in New York, or were just not part of our lives. We mostly spent summer time with our three cousins at Grandma & Grandpa Doughtery’s ranch in Davis, California. I followed the older ones around, probably like a puppy dog thinking they were pretty neat. But I secretly wished for a cousin that was a girl who would hang out with Madeleine and I. After I married my husband I asked about his cousins. What were their names? What were they like? Well he knew a few of them and told me about the ones he could remember. His mother had 8 siblings plus a cousin that was raised as a brother and he could not remember all the cousins names or even what they looked like. They mostly lived back in Kansas.
When we were just starting our family research I put a genealogy website on Roots Web back in the mid 1990’s. A woman, Francis, contacted us from New Mexico. She was a half second cousin from a  Great Aunt Alice that we knew nothing about except her name.  That was on the Putnam line. That opened up a whole passel of new relatives and a very interesting story. Maybe Madeleine will tell that one. After I started this blog I had another distant Putnam cousin contact me. He comes from our Salem, Massachusetts Putnam line, pretty far back.

Next I recall being contacted by a women who was a Dougherty. Kim was a direct descendant of our William Dougherty. From her we learned that we had Dougherty brothers on both the union and confederate sides in the American Civil War and our Great Uncle Clark Dougherty, the confederate soldier, descendants now live in Florida, Georgia and Minnesota or is it Michigan. This past year we had another cousin from Clarks’ line contact us through this blog.

After my sister and I had been to England we had a descendant  from the Heap Line contact us. I had thought at the time our Charles Heap was the only one of that line to cross to America in the late 1800’s, but Michael who found us through the internet is a second cousin 1x removed (I think),  whose ancestor was a brother to our Charles, his family still lives on the east coast. Now that line has had several shirt tail cousins show up over time. One line still resides in England and going back through the Heap line we have Judith from the Lees line that contacted us just recently from where she lives in Australia.

Thanks to the internet my extended family has grown and certainly contributed to the enjoyment of doing this research. I now get confused about my cousins and how they are related to me just like my husband. We have also connected with more cousins on my husband’s family lines. Keeping in contact is not always easy but I am glad they found me and I love having all these connections however tenuous out there.

So if you ever wondered if it is worth while to put your family history out there in some form or other, I would say most definitely. Especially if you feel a little lacking on contemporary cousins.