Wonderful story, Gina, and I'm so glad that you had success. You said it all - be imaginative and persistant! It does pay off! Barbara Bower Yorktown -----Original Message----- From: Ginamarina [mailto:ginamarina@usa.net] Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2001 11:11 AM To: BOWER-L@rootsweb.com Subject: [BOWER] Never give up! I have been here on this Bower list for years, I believe since early 1999, and unfortunately have found not one thing on my mysterious Martin Bower from Pennsylvania. I still have a theory that he is a son from a family who became orphaned, but so far I have no clues....... However, I had been on some German websites and usenet groups posting about my mom's family... with no real luck, only finding out that maybe the mysterious "Vera, Germany" in my great aunt's handwriting MAY have been "Gera". But I have no way to verify it because I have no idea where Great Aunt Esther got her information..... and as I was mowing the grass on tuesday I was thinking about my Grandpa Thieme, who passed away on 31-Dec-1998. Missing him and thinking about the reunions there use to be.... and then thinking about genealogy...... coming in and looking at my group sheets.... wondering why on earth I have no information about his aunts and uncles..... I spent most of Tuesday evening on AIM with my Mom, picking her memory, and scouring the SSDI for relatives only to find out that most of grandpa's cousins lived right here in Wisconsin, and the others lived in Kansas. Mom remembered some great aunts and uncles, and some people she had met, and some stories about Grandpa packing up in his 20's with his cousin John from KS during the depression and travelling the midwest picking crops for people.... I got her into the social security index, and I went for the Kansas Genweb site.... and stumbled across a high school alumni page from the county where Grandpa's uncle had passed away. Sure enough, I found two Thiemes.... I went out on a limb and sent off two emails that night. The next day I was ecstatic. I had emailed two sisters, both daughters of Grandpa's cousin John, so they are my mom's second cousins. One had spoken to their dad - who is ALIVE and 87 - and he remembered my grandpa vividly and began to talk about the family..... This has opened an entirely new door. First for my Mom, who misses her father terribly, and now gets to hear more about their adventures as young men, and possibly even go to Kansas and meet these relatives; and second, I now have more people interested in my search and an entirely new branch of the family has been opened up to scour for the "old bible" or that box of photos in someone's closet. What's sad is that I never thought of this 5 or 10 years ago... or while my Grandpa was alive ... why did the notion come to me this week? no idea. But I guess I wanted to share my small victory, and say keep thinking creatively, you never know what you may have overlooked the first time through. I tend to forget how living relatives may have the keys to answering the questions about my distant ancestors, and shame on me!! Good luck to all, Gina Bower ==== BOWER Mailing List ==== Please do not send messages with attachments, HTML, MIME, or any other enhanced text to the list. RootsWeb does not allow messages with those settings through their servers and will only return them to you.