Cousinhood

Substack serendipity and the Genealogy 16.

Chicago cousins, ca 1935: from left to right, Charles Swanson, Earle Olsen, Andrew Olsen Jr (behind Earle), their grandmother Alice Anderson, Beverley Swanson, George Anderson Jr.

A few months ago there was a popular thread among the genealogists on Substack that I saw via

Kirsi Dahl

’s piece Sixteen Names, Endless Possibilities. She in turn credited

Mightier Acorns

’s Families Reunions: Our Sixteens. Each writer listed their 16 great-great-grandparents with the simple and brilliant recommendation that other genealogists do the same so we can find each other— and cross reference our knowledge.¹ Genealogists are thriving on Substack (thanks

Barbara Tien

and

Robin Stewart

for all your work here!) and I’ll share my eight (not sixteen, unfortunately) at the end of this post. But first, I want to report on second cousins I’ve already found online.

Laura, 2016

In 2016 an Anderson cousin interested in genealogy stumbled on a video my husband had posted online when my father passed away. In the video we tour my father’s house as he talks about his art. Laura reached out to my husband through the video and then found me, signing her email “your long lost cousin.” Laura’s grandfather, Henry William Anderson, and my grandmother Elsie Anderson Olsen were siblings. This new second cousin was exactly my age but had grown up in Chicago, where she still lived in a suburb and worked for a tech consulting company. I had never met any second cousin on my father’s side—I didn’t even know their names—so she was a wonderful discovery. She also seemed to be a parallel self: the person I might have been if my father hadn’t left Chicago. In October 2019 I attended a conference in Chicago and used the opportunity to do some research and meet this second cousin I had never known about.

Over snacks in a hotel lounge we compared notes about the Andersons and both came up fairly empty. Our Great Aunt Marie was the best source we had, though there were some shared rumors about our great-grandfather Henry Phillip Anderson and his sister Lizzie being orphaned and adopted. That was all. Our most common denominator was that lack of family history or contact: Elsie, Henry William, and Marie had four other siblings, yet despite the burgeoning family branches neither of us had known any of our paternal cousins or second cousins. “I always envied my husband’s large family and their closeness,” my new cousin told me. “Instead, my father had half-siblings he didn’t even know about until he was a teenager.” It seems that that was one reason she and I both took up genealogy. She was excited to hear about my research and I told her I’d report on my visit to the family plot in Oak Woods the next day. Though she had grown up in a suburb on the South side, she had never been there. The next day I got there just after it closed. I never mentioned to Laura that my father was gay. I was still keeping his secret, at least from family members.

a page from Andrew Olsen Jr’s photo album

I have often said (and written) that I never met any of my father’s cousins because he left them all behind when he left Chicago. That’s mostly true, but I forget one exception. The circumstances were so unlikely that they are easy to miss. In 1997, my sister lived in Los Angeles and I drove down from Palo Alto with my husband and toddler to meet my mother there for a visit. Great-Aunt Marie had died in 1995 but she had always urged me and my sisters to get in touch with her niece Alice Anderson, who had married and settled with her children in the Los Angeles area. She was my father’s maternal cousin but older than my father; in fact, she was probably close in age to Marie herself, who had been the youngest of her siblings. Cousin Alice invited us to her suburban home and we followed her complicated directions there. She was very warm and welcoming. It was Easter and she had candy for my daughter and her granddaughter, who played together.

But she also made it clear that she had no fondness for my father (who was still alive then) or interest in what he had been doing over the past fifty years since she had seen him. “No one liked Earle,” I remember her saying. Could she possibly have said that to us so bluntly? That’s how I remember it. My mother and sister remember her complaining about having to attend “Earlie’s” birthday parties as a child. She gave the impression that the Olsens considered themselves better than the rest of the family and Earle was the spoiled little prince. (That seemed plausible—?) Cousin Alice and I exchanged Christmas cards after that but never met again.

Pat, 2024

At the end of this past August I was delighted to receive a one-line email to my Substack address from another second cousin: “My father was William Henry Anderson, son of Henry Anderson who was Elsie’s brother.” When I wrote back, Pat gave me more details.

Her father had passed away at 97 years old in 2020. Amazingly, he still has two surviving siblings, and she knows of many cousins in Illinois, Indiana, California, and Tennessee. She must have found me through my post on my father’s brother Andrew Jr. because she mentioned the story of his death. In fact, she said her father had been at the same Air Force base at the time, which I hadn’t known. She told me that my grandfather gave her father Andrew Jr.’s train set after his death and they still have it. It was astonishing to have another angle on a family story. (I have vague memories of my father talking about playing with trains with his older brother.)

Olsen family train set, given to and photographed by an Anderson cousin. Thanks for the photo, Pat!

I love the idea of these posts (and online storytelling) as a virtual net cast into the deep— to see what you’ll catch. You just don’t know!

To end, I want to return to the family photo I began with: my father with five of his cousins in the 1930s. Regardless of whatever came next, they all look happy on that day, in that place, together.

And Here Are My Eight!

(I am not sure of any of the names in the preceding generation on my father’s side so I’ve kept to eight.)

PATERNAL

Hans Peter Olsen²: born 1858 Holbaek, Denmark; died 1929 Chicago, IL.

Karen Marie Fredericksen: born 1864 Holbaek, Denmark; died 1938 Chicago, IL. 

Henry Phillip Anderson³: born 1867 Chicago, IL; died 1933 Chicago, IL.

Elise/Alice Steiber: born 1872 Nuremberg, Germany; died 1964 Florida.

MATERNAL

Robert Espie: born 1858 Portaferry, Ireland; died 1946 Worcester, MA.

Annie Law Clark⁴: born 1861 Lanark, Scotland; died 1942 Woodhaven, NY.

Frank David Jordan⁵: born 1869 Scranton, PA; died 1912 Scranton, PA.

Minnie Florence Marlatt: born 1875 Scranton, PA; died 1940s New Jersey.

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Thanks for reading this far— and a warm welcome to new subscribers! Please like, share, or comment— it helps this post reach further, to use that net metaphor. Have any of you found people online— old friends or relations? Let’s compare notes/nets.

1.

Kirsi Dahl

also has some very helpful tips for improving search engine optimization in order to be found more easily. I use a net metaphor (to play on internet) above but she aptly calls these posts a “beacon” for other genealogists and researchers.

2. I have a wonderful Danish studio portrait of this patriarchal Hans that I included in a post on family names.

3. As implied above, Anderson is not actually the family name in previous generations, only in subsequent ones. Henry Phillip Anderson and his sister were born Galvins and adopted by Andersons.

4.

Mightier Acorns

wrote a post on Clarks in their family but mine don’t overlap.

5. I recently discovered that these Jordans descend from an early colonial settler, Reverend Robert Jordan (1612-circa 1679). His bio includes a father who died of the plague in Worcester, England (that’s practically medieval!), clerical studies at Balliol College in Oxford (my first association: Lord Peter Wimsey…), migration to the American colonies in 1640 (whaaat?), and the accumulation of thousands of acres of indigenous land around Cape Elizabeth (then a part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony but now in the state of Maine.) This all sounds bananas to me, like what I imagine to be the plot of a James Fenimore Cooper novel if I had ever read one (I will get to it!).