Never Call It Quits

On genealogy research at times I reach a dead end – and that can be taken literally.

For the past couple of months I have not advanced much on any family research items, so to make my time useful I have been combing what I have looking for errors and checking for spelling and I might as well forget about checking for grammar, that is a wasted effort.

I have came across a few minor things and have when I have dutifully posted to my genealogy program.

Then, the day before yesterday from out in the unknown cyber space I received an email from another Hunter researcher. He read some stuff that I wrote about the Hunters that found its way in some little genealogy publication on-line. I didn’t know about it being on line on that site, well, I never heard of the site, but he read it to me, and yep, it was me, it said things I knew about and touted and had my writing cadence.

This guy is a new Hunter researcher. We swapped several emails to get to know each other, or as I like to say, “smelling each other’s asses” and he is just getting into retirement, two years younger than I am. He is descended from one of my great grandfather’s sons. I had no idea what happened to this son, who is named John Rafas Hunter. I know who he married and that they moved to Birmingham about the turn of the century (about 1900) and as far as I knew they were never heard from since.

He emailed me five pages of data about John Rafas’s four children, and their children, and then their children, which would include him.

I thought it was interesting that the family went to Birmingham to work in the steel mills. Then their some of their children moved to Lorain, Ohio, to work for U.S. Steel. For maybe six or seven decades it was the family trade, of that branch.

And then to top it off, I recalled Lorain, Ohio from an entry years earlier, so I ran a search on my genealogy program and it pulled up a Huey distant relative that moved to Lorain, Ohio, in 1914 to work at U.S. Steel.

This Huey guy and John Rafas Hunter, although a generation apart both lived in the same community of Cherokee County, Ga. And John’s sons moved to Lorain. Did they know the Huey man before they went there.

The flow of family migrating is interesting.

The man that emailed me called me today. We talked for an hour. We had a good rapport. After our conversation I put all the Hunter history on a CD and all the Hunter pictures of humans and graves on another CD and will mailed to him.

This always happens when I run into a brick wall, new stuff falls from the heavens.