Hartley Family Tree - From NY>MN>OR>WA>IL>MOUpdated March 17, 2011 |
David Bruce Hartley, Jr. dave-hartley35@hotmail.com |
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| GENEALOGY IS ALL ABOUT RESEARCH, DETECTIVE WORK, & DISCOVERY. I still fondly remember our first family reunion. It was 1965 & Dad took our family to a lakeside resort in Minnesota to visit his cousin Keith's family. There I met relatives I never knew I had. The Steinkraus girls were my 2nd cousins. One look at them convinced me that the pretty genes had landed on their side of the family tree & at 13 I was in love for the first time. 45 years has passed, I've had a 30 year career as a Computer Engineer, I've loved & lost, I was married for 12 years, then divorced amicably, & inherited a wonderful godson. My life, despite being unemployed for 3 months, is truly blessed. I have my sight, my sanity, my debatable good looks, a family that loves me, & friends that I trust & can rely on. These last 6 months I have immersed myself in researching our family tree, this time with amazing results. On October 6, 2010 I received an email that changed my life. It said "Good afternoon, My name is Brenda Hartley and I am married to Mark Hartley, who I believe is a relative of yours. We live in Western New York. I have been working on his family tree for some time and cannot find much information on the Hartley line. While surfing the net during lunch I came across your entry in Dreambook." She saw Mark's father Alvin & grandfather George in my listing on Dreambook, a genealogy bulletin board that years back, in desperation, I had listed as much family info as we knew in the hopes that someday, someone would see part of their family, contact me, & fill in a few holes in our family tree. Normally, a genealogist's newest data is a 70 year old census - due to the U.S. Census desire to protect your identity & personal information until you're dead. The 1930 census listed Alvin as a 10 year old, but Brenda quite literally blew me out of the water by filling in 80 years of her branch of our family. I was quite familiar with Mark's great grandfather Thomas Holmes Hartley - he's the oldest brother of MY great grandfather. He was barely a year old in 1849 when Thomas Hartley & Ann Holmes came to America & settled in Warsaw, NY - the first 3 Hartleys to immigrate. A year later, Mary was the first Hartley born in America. Then came William in 1853, Jane Ann in 1855, my great grandfather John Holmes Hartley in 1861, & finally Sarah in 1863. The family info she provided wouldn't be released by the census until 2080 - well after my eventual demise. The result of her serendipitous discovery in October is that I now have 30 or 40 third cousins that I never knew existed. She doubled my family, & I now feel twice as blessed & twice as connected to my family. So, to celebrate the discovery of the family tree branch that contains our first known third cousins, I think it's only appropriate that we have another family reunion - to give everyone a chance to get to know their newfound relatives. Therefore, the 2nd Hartley Family Reunion is being tentatively planned for a summer weekend in 2012 or 2013. If you're on our Hartley Family Tree, or related to someone who is, you're invited. The location will probably be somewhere near Chicago. Possibilities that come to mind are the Michigan Dunes State Park, or Door County in Wisconsin, but any & all suggestions will be considered. Give it some thought & let me know what y'all want to do. -NEARLY EVERYONE'S THIRD COUSIN DAVE- |
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