A number of us on my mother's side of the family have joined 23andMe. I don't reach out much to distant relatives there, but my cousin Tracy does. A fourth cousin who lives in New Jersey recently told Tracy about a terrific Polish genealogy site (https://geneteka.genealodzy.pl/, if you're interested), and I'm finding it hard not to spend hours there.
The woman to the right is my great-grandmother, Johanna Swierzbutowski Organista, who died in 1933 in northern Wisconsin. About all we knew about her was that she had two brothers and grew up "on a farm outside Warsaw." Now we know the farm was in what is now far northeast Poland, less than a hundred miles from Belarus. Johanna had seven siblings, not two. Her husband, my great-grandfather Cajetan Organista, grew up just twenty miles away and had ten siblings, not just the three we knew about. A family legend that Cajetan left for the United States under the threat of death for killing a deer on a czarist estate just might be more than a legend; such a hunting lodge still exists less than 100 miles away.
Now you're probably thinking, well, Melanie, that's all well and good but I'm not related to any of these people, so why are you telling me all this?
I think because connection matters. I was at a family wedding last month with Tracy and her older siblings. They're the ones with whom I played Red Light Green Light and Red Rover and a million other childhood games. They're among the few people alive who remember me when I was five years old. I love them, and I love how easily we fall back into each other's lives even when we haven't seen each other for a few years. I'd like to think that in heaven, Johanna and her brother Boleslaw ("Billy") are smiling because Tracy and our fourth cousin have connected, and because there are still people interested in their stories.
I hope you'll consider this month reaching out to a cousin or friend you haven't seen in a while. Connection helps us know where we came from, and can be a comfort on the road to where we're going.
