It's a small world

One of my favorite things about genealogy is connecting with other genealogists and with cousins I didn't even know I had. Over the years, I've met quite a few distant relatives, some of whom have become very close friends.

Genealogy has made me realize what a "small world" it really is, as the saying goes. A few years ago, I found some Hickey cousins through a message board online. They put me in touch with another cousin who lived in Maryland. When I contacted the Maryland cousin, she said that she wasn't doing genealogy any more but had a niece that was. When she told me where her niece lived, I was shocked. She lived in the same small town as me, less than 5 miles from my house! I called her up and was able to meet her, as well as her mother and uncle (who were my mother's second cousins).

A few years later I was researching James and Sarah Hickey's daughter Elizabeth. While searching the 1930 census for Elizabeth, I discovered that she was living on Aldershot Road (near Catonsville) that year, with her daughter Elizabeth Minogue and her family. This was quite an interesting development, because my husband and I had lived one street up from Aldershot when we lived in Maryland.

This discovery brought to my mind an incident which had occurred about 20 years earlier, shortly after we bought our house in Maryland. At that time, there were a series of arson fires in our neighborhood, mostly small blazes set in nearby dumpsters. One day, though, the property behind us caught on fire. We called the fire department, but by the time they arrived the garage was ablaze and the flames had spread to the back of the house. The next day we learned that an elderly woman had been asleep in an upstairs bedroom and had been rescued by the firemen.

When I discovered that Elizabeth Hickey and her daughter had lived on Aldershot, I wondered which house they had lived in. The next time I was in Maryland I drove down Aldershot and checked it out. I could hardly believe it when I saw that it was the house directly behind our old house, the same one that had caught on fire. I later learned that the woman rescued by the fire department was none other than Elizabeth Minogue, the daughter of Elizabeth Hickey and also my grandmother's first cousin. I only wish that I had known at the time that she was a relative. I would like to have gotten to know her.