Opinion : Yes, we are probably related...

...sorry if that makes you cringe...

Our daughter left to be a camp counselor in Tennessee two months ago. She called a few weeks later to tell me that one of the other counselors there said she had only been to one small town in Iowa, a town called Vinton!

Of course, our daughter went nuts, she just couldn't believe it. I mean, what are the odds?

Tonight I received a call from my daughter who is halfway between home and Tennessee. "Hey, do you know any Jefferies from Vinton?" I said, well, "I knew Ruth Jefferies, she used to be my school teacher."

*Daughter speaks to someone else on the other end of the line...(I suppose our kids will wonder why we called it a line when it was on a cell phone)*

"Ruth Jefferies used to be her teacher!" she reports to the faceless voice on the other end of the phone.

"Cool!  She is my grandma!" replied the faceless voice I could hear in the background.

Then said voice said, "Do you know any Flickingers?" I drew a blank there until he mentioned a red barn just over a hill north of town. I said, "Oh! THOSE Flickingers!  Tell him that your great grandpa Paul used to do chores for them when they were gone! They also found a helium balloon that you sent in the air with a note on it from a family reunion!" 

All this gets repeated....and the noise on the other end escalates.

Then I hear the voice talking to his mom on his cell phone, and relays questions from his mom to me via my daughter.

We go through the list of all the family names, people in town and then he mentions something about Garrison, and how his dad used to live a house away from the Hitchin' Post, do I know where that is?

I reply that "Yes I do…and three of my family tree branches lived in Garrison, McNeal, Grimm and Noe."

This fires another round of questions.

"Do you know the aviation guy? Mark?

And Grimm? Do you know Mike or Carol? Mike's a bugler with the veterans!"
 

Well, I reply not really, but I'm sure he's related.  I, of course, relay this to Dean.

"Oh, I know who that is! He always talks to me, but I never knew his name!" says the guy, whose job it is to ask questions…

So I tell him I will ask another relative from church and see if she can explain how we are related.

The one family we couldn't figure out was Mike and Deb who farm, and they have a daughter, this drew a blank, but I think he said you were his cousins.

So from Nick H. in Illinois, (whose dad is in the Air Force and his mom graduated from Vinton in '76 and was a Flickinger,) He said to say, "Hello!"

After we covered all the family names I could think of, he asked who else I knew.  I said, "Well, how about Karrs."

"Oh I know them!"

I said to my daughter the go between, "Tell him about Vinton Today!"

She said, "My mom and dad do the website Vinton Today."

"I READ IT EVERY DAY" replies Nicolas.

So then I asked, "Is he the one the brought Amy (the girl our daughter was the counselor with) out to Sanders Farm?

"Yes! She and mom are related."

So folks, when they say it really is a small world, it really is.

And to my kids, again, YES, we are related to EVERYONE…at least it appears that we are. Now wouldn't THAT be an awesome website to have, where we can link everyone in the county…on second thought, I'd rather have that as a paper only project, there's too much of our info on the internet already!