Wow! Last week I wrote about finding another cousin and this week I heard from two SHACKFORD cousins, father and daughter. He's my fifth cousin once removed and she's a fifth cousin, twice removed (the genealogy software does that calculation). One posted a comment to this WEB page, and the other to the Facebook page which is where these blogs are also posted.
One of their ancestors is Charles William Shackford, who we wrote about last evening in honor of this new contact!
Our common ancestor is Samuel Shackford (1720-1796) and Mary Coombs, a family who we've now added to the list of people to research and write about.
What's really neat about this contact is that when I first started researching genealogy (around 1998), I searched for lists of SHACKFORDs and wrote (yes, those things we now call snail mail) to every SHACKFORD for whom I could find an address. Many of the addresses were out of date and I received many "can not deliver" replies from the post office.
But in February of 1998, I received a handwritten letter back from the father of the person who just found this WEBsite. He was also interested in genealogy and shared a typewritten genealogy work that had been compiled back in 1954 showing the ancestral line for himself and his two young children. He also had hand written notes of his genealogy searches, and notes from his research with a George Shackford and his correspondence with Martha Hale Shackford, Professor at Wellesley who was researching the Shackforth's of Diss, Norfolk, England and Samuel Shuckford apparently trying to learn more about the immigrant William Shackford. We corresponded again in September of 2004. I was living in Germany at the time and he shared his very different experience of being there in 1945 feeling the breeze of a sniper's bullet pass by his left ear. He was hoping to live to age 90 but unfortunately passed in 2006 at the age of 87, before I returned from Germany.
Hearing from a new cousin this week, has me appreciating today's speedy long distant correspondence methods which make it easier to share (and research) SHACKFORD family history. However it has been great this week to pull out my hard copy SHACKFORD files and touch sixteen year old hand written letters that arrived via the post office and remember how excited I was to receive a letter from 3,000 miles away and to learn that another distant cousin was interested in SHACKFORD family history.
Copyright 2014 Joanne Shackford Parkes