Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Thank You Devereaux Weeks


Devereaux is the person who gave me copies of pages from the Samuel C. Weeks bible. The story of how we teamed up is interesting and may motivate you to try to team up with other family researchers.

I've been working on my families genealogy for close to ten years now. Over that time frame I have made contact with other cousins researching the Weeks family. Most if not all of these cousins were “found” on ancestry.com or on various genealogy message boards. Of the 10 or so “lost cousins” I've made contact with there is one cousin in particular, Jeff Weeks, that I have been sharing information with since early 2011.

In one of my message board sessions a fellow researcher asked me if I might be related to a Devereaux Weeks. I didn't have Devereaux in my database so I decided I'd check it out. I soon found out that Devereaux lived in Austin, TX. Since I live in south TX I thought it would be fun to have a cousin so close to my home. I did a little more research on Devereaux but still had no contact information.

Then a few months ago Jeff surprised me with a mailing address for a Devereaux Weeks in GA. Seems Devereaux is in Jeff's family tree. So I sent a letter to Devereaux and two weeks later I received a small package from him. The package included a short note with an email address and a marked up copy of the Samuel C. Weeks Descendents Report I included with my letter. There were red marks all over the report and comments like “wrong birth date for this person, you left out these children and on and on”. I'm looking at all these corrections with a smile on my face while thinking with all these errors this guy must think I'm an idiot.

A few email exchanges later I asked Devereaux how he got all this wonderful Weeks information? He simply replied with, “I have the Samuel C. Weeks bible”.

I guess the the moral of this story is “I'll take luck over skill any day of the week”.




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