My Family Reunion thanks to #Ancestryhour

 

 

Recently I was fortunate enough to meet up with some long lost family members and reconnect with my Daniels ancestors from Dublin. This part of my family has been my “Brick wall” for a long, long time.

 

Thanks to the kind help of my friends on, #Ancestry Hour on Twitter, with a special  mention to my friend Tara, I was able to make contact with my long lost cousins and finally meet up and share family stories and find out more about my Irish Ancestors and my wall has come tumbling down……….

 

 

 

 

I recently shared my story on #Ancestry Hour and now want to share the story with the wider Family History Community. Stories like this, helping other members of the family tree community, like Tara did, and helping me too find my long lost cousins, are for me, the most enjoyable aspects and make family history such a pleasurable and exciting hobby.

 

Words cannot express the excitement and gratitude I felt, when I finally made contact with my Daniels family. I had tried many times over the years to trace living descendants and have previously visited Dublin twice, but without any luck of finding any of my Family. I had almost given up hope……

 

But like all good Genealogists, I thought I would give it one last try on #Ancestry Hour last year. Tara, being resident in Dublin, kindly replied and was able to provide me with a death notice for a John Daniels who had recently died. The area looked a good match for my family, so I sent an email to the Funeral Company explaining my story and asked if they would kindly pass on my details to the deceased’s family. I genuinely expected no reply or for it to be the wrong family.

 

Several days later I had the surprise of my life, and an email from John Daniels niece and I had indeed found “My Family”. I never really bought into the genealogist’s belief of “serendipity”, but the day I contacted my Daniels family in Dublin was exactly one year to the day, that my Great Uncle John had died. A co-incidence???

 

Moving on to my Family reunion, I was excited and thrilled to meet my new cousin and his wife and we spent a lovely afternoon and evening together and shared wonderful stories and tales, far too many to tell you all here, that will have to wait to another blog. The stories and tales could fill a book!

 

 However what my Cousin Sean did bring over with him, was truly remarkable and very emotional for me.

 

 

 

Amazingly he brought with him a complete biography and military dossier, on my Great Uncle John Daniels and his Father John Daniels Senior and John senior’s brother William Daniels, I was completely astounded at all the details included and like all family historian’s it was like gold dust!

 

 

 

 

The fact that I had made contact with my family and we had met up was amazing, the fact that Sean had brought with him a complete family biography was remarkable and what was too follow was truly incredible!

 

 

Sean brought with him, the actual “Button Stick” that had belonged to my Great Uncle John! This was kindly passed to Sean, by My Great Aunt Josie, not only that, Sean had kindly mounted the button stick* into a display case, this was such an emotional moment for me, to be entrusted with my Great Uncle’s button stick was very humbling and I will be forever grateful.

 

 

* Button sticks were issued as a tool to assist with the cleaning of buttons, badges and brass equipment components of a soldier’s personal equipment. For example, the button stick would be passed under a jacket button as a barrier to allow polishing without staining the material. 

 Prior to the discovery of my new family in Dublin, I had written a blog explaining the details of my two previous visits to Dublin and what I had discovered up until that point. This blog can be found here:

https://wordpress.com/post/chiddicksfamilytree.wordpress.com?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchiddicksfamilytree.wordpress.com%2F2017%2F08%2F21%2Fthe-dublin-connection%2F&title=The%20Dublin%20Connection

So you just never know where the breakthrough will come and how things will develop………………………..none of this would have happened without the help of Tara and #AncestryHour so a massive thanks from me!! 

Please see my regular blog for Family Tree Magazine Here