I grew up in a friendly welter of first cousins. My mother was one of five, all of whom married and provided cousins for my brothers and me. Her mother’s family had lived in Frankfort, but Grandmother Lizzie’s husband found work in Louisville, and there they settled and raised their family. In the post-World-War-Two years they and all their children migrated separately to Charlestown, Indiana for the inexpensive housing available there after the Black Powder plant cut back, and for several years in the 1950s everyone lived a short walk away in the "Project." My mother and her sibs were not a demonstrative lot, but they had grown up together through the Depression years and were firmly there for each other in a way we kids never had to question. Not much hugging, but probably more secret loans and quiet pep talks than any of us will know. Like so many big families, we were cash poor and family rich. But despite providing my generation with this wealth of first cousins, my mother and aunts and uncles rarely mentioned their own cousins or introduced us to any second cousins. In fact, "cousin" in my own experience only meant "first cousin." "Second cousins" were something only characters in books had, something glamorous and exotic, like Baked Alaska.

Eventually, as we cousins grew older and families became better off, the various families moved back to Louisville, except for one uncle who stayed on and keeps our link to Charlestown and our childhoods alive. And though when we were all younger our connections went unremarked, as the oldest started going off to college or service, marrying and moving away, my mother’s sister instituted the Thanksgiving family reunion to keep us in touch. Years later, after I married and returned to my Louisville roots to raise my own children, I was tapped as Matriarch-in-Training and took on the Thanksgiving feast, the turkey platter and the extra flatware. And my aunt showed me the family Bible that had belonged originally to her mother’s parents and helped me trace my grandmother’s family back to their Frankfort roots. I had always heard vague references to the Frankfort family, but it wasn’t a subject that appeared to hold much interest for my mother or her sister, and after my grandmother’s passing the ties seemed to be lost. Certainly my own branch of the family maintained no contacts there and in fact I had never been there.

Then my dear aunt passed on last year, and the mantle of Matriarch came down on me for good (my own mother is alive and well, but inconveniently located in Sacramento now, and in any case has no vocation for this). My uncle brought me the Bible and also a beautiful old family group photograph from the early 1900s, which alas was completely unlabeled. Who were the people on the porch? We had no clues. It was finally time to go to Frankfort.

My youngest uncle knew that many of the Frankfort connections his mother had kept were now also gone, but he could remember the married name of one of his cousins, a rather unusual one. I went to an Internet search engine and found a couple of names and addresses and sent off notes. Presently I was e-mailed by my second cousin Barbara, granddaughter of my grandmother’s older sister and de facto matriarch of her own branch of the family. It took me a little while to identify her in the scheme of things but she was very clear on who I was. Through the e-mail came a long-forgotten school photo of a nine-year-old, pigtailed me. It seems that though my generation was largely unaware of it, my grandmother (Lizzie to us, Aunt Lib in Frankfort) was passionately devoted to her Frankfort nieces, and the affection was returned. My mother’s cousin Florence had lovingly collected years of snapshots of Aunt Lib’s children and grandchildren. My grandmother’s older sister Calla, the only one of her family to remain in Frankfort, had married and had five children, then died rather young, when her two youngest girls were only tots. She left behind two older daughters, but Florence was acknowledged to be inappropriate to step into this role, so Toodie, as she was known, commenced mothering her baby sisters at the tender age of 13. It must have been a vocation she enjoyed, as she went on to marry and raise eight children of her own. And unremarked by my mother and her sibs, my grandmother, as best she could in the absence of finances and easy transportation, kept up with her motherless nieces and subbed as a grandmother to their children, quite successfully to judge by the photographic archive that has survived.

And my second cousin Barb, inheritor of her mother’s and aunt’s stash of mementos, invites me to come to Frankfort and compare notes with her. She lives in a nice old farmhouse miles out of town, so we arrange to meet at a shopping center more easily found. She takes me to the Kentucky History Center and to the nearby cemetery where several of our mutual ancestors are buried, and shows me their graves (alas, mostly unmarked … times were hard for our ancestors, whether in Frankfort or Louisville). She takes me to meet her last surviving aunt, Louise, and I produce the hefty family Bible and show Louise the family’s recorded history, and the first picture she has ever seen of her grandfather Frank, the blacksmith.

Then Barb and I sit down at her kitchen table and study the picture of the people on the porch. "I have never seen this picture," she says, "but I have one that was made the same day. You can see that the people are wearing the same clothes." Hers is taken from farther away, so the house and its setting are clearer but the individuals less distinct. But she knows who some of them are. "That’s Aunt Aline on the left, don’t know who the older lady is, but that’s my grandmother Callie on the right. That’s Aunt Lib behind them, the little girl with the doll, and their mother, our great-grandmother Florence, in the doorway." We study the assembled family. We surmise that the young man on Aline’s right is probably her brother Austin Lee, who was killed not long after. Barb supposes that this picture may have been made on the occasion of great-grandfather Frank’s death; he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1904, and the clothing styles (plus the preponderance of black) would seem to bear this out. Certainly they are a somber lot, gazing levelly at us from across the years. My first impression is how attractive the Edwards girls were. No one had ever mentioned it, although I had seen more recent pictures of my grandmother as a lovely young wife and mother. I guess in my mother’s and aunt’s memories my grandmother and great-aunt Aline were always older and sterner (Callie in any event had been gone since 1931). But these two older Edwards daughters were beautiful. It is easy to imagine that had they been the governor’s daughters instead of the blacksmith’s, their portraits might be hanging elsewhere in Frankfort even now.

Later I show the picture to my mother. I had hoped that she might remember having seen it as a child and recall who some of the other individuals were, but she had never seen it before. I am beginning to wonder if this is a recurring puzzle, found by each survivor and left behind again in turn, still unlabeled. Perhaps my aunt herself had never seen it until she was sorting out my grandmother’s effects, and my grandmother had found it, unlabeled, in her mother Flossie's things. Certainly my grandmother would have known who they all were but she was notorious for not identifying her photographs. Barb herself is a stickler for this. She tsks at the oversight. Her own garage full of photo albums is carefully organized and labeled, although she too has inherited a few mysteries to solve.

It is a sad circumstance of genealogy that by the time most of us have the perspective and leisure to ask this kind of question, most of the people who could have answered it are gone. Our younger selves have more immediate questions: As a twenty-something, we wonder Will he call me? And Can I afford these boots? In our thirties and forties, when for most of us those earlier questions are answered (one way or the other), we ask How am I going to get 30 cupcakes baked and to my kid’s classroom and still be on time for my meeting? Most of us wait until middle age to speculate on how grandpa and grandma met and where they married and why they seem to have been always one stagecoach ahead of the census takers (in the case of our footloose pioneer progenitors). And unless we were fortunate enough to belong to families so illustrious or colorful that their histories were retold or recorded, these are questions that we are largely left to research in the absence of any easy answers.

But this is also, if we’re lucky, the time to find and get to know those second cousins and other relatives we may not have been acquainted with or close to in the past. I like to describe my new pal Barb as "That mother lode every new genealogist hopes she will find: A friendly cousin with an ISP, a scanner, a garage full of photographs and a file cabinet full of research!" I have only been researching our family history seriously for a little over a year, but Barbara has devoted ten years to it, inspired in her turn by the earlier passing of her parents and aunts. She is a wonderful, caring, generous spirit and we have spent happy hours together, not only sharing research but catching up with each other’s lives and finding much in common. We are the same age; we spent our early lives somewhat differently, as she married sooner than I did and started raising her family earlier, while I took some time to travel first. But like so many people who make it to middle age, our various paths have converged to common ground now: We are both grandparents, and survivors of life’s large and small trials. Obviously our mothers didn’t share enough mutual interests to maintain a connection across the distances between them but we are very pleased to have found each other, and my other closer kinfolks have also enjoyed getting to know her and her brothers and sisters in Frankfort. We all feel the richer for having reestablished the ties, and have enjoyed several get-togethers where everyone hauls out old photo albums … followed by the compilation of wish lists for each other where we scan and share our old treasures.

And I am also enriched by knowing my husband’s second cousins. My research into his family has put us in touch with a delightful lady in Ohio who shares e-mailed jokes and scans of old family photographs and frequently brightens our day with notes and nonsense.

My attempts to connect with my paternal second cousins have been less successful. My paternal grandfather was an only child, so there are none to locate there. His wife was one of seven, six of whom married and had families, but such few as I have been able to locate have not cared to return my interest. My father’s family, from what I know of it, was much less affectionate than my mother’s, and evidently connected very little with each other or with us. Curiously enough, this is probably the most illustrious thread in my heritage, as great-grandfather Flournoy appears to have been a direct descendant of a respected Huguenot family, including a Revolutionary War soldier, and later in the line a Mayflower descendant married in. This information was most likely lost during later generations’ moves through Missouri, Texas and California, as none of my kinfolks seem to have been aware of it.  At any rate, although all of my great-aunts and -uncles, born in Missouri, seem to have moved out to Los Angeles in adulthood, they don’t seem to have kept up with each other’s families much. So far I have only my first cousins (sons and daughter of my father’s sister and brother) there. So any happy second-cousin discoveries are still only a fond hope there.

But I count myself blessed with the cousins I have. It is a happiness the younger me could never have envisioned, sitting around a kitchen table looking at old photographs and putting together the puzzle pieces of old histories. But to judge by its burgeoning presence on the Internet, it is a joy many, many people are discovering. My children, in the way of most young people, shrug off the entire subject. "Do I have to go along when you visit (blank)? He/She’s so old!" I always point out that everyone gets old … if they’re lucky! And when I look at our genetic inheritance, I see a great many very old folks, living or passed on, which bodes very well for the rest of us turning into old folks ourselves.

And I see more valuable things even than this.  Many people when they research their lineage hold out hope of discovering, if not tangible treasure (valuable artifacts, land titles etc.) at least an impressive heritage or famous ancestor.  What I see looking back at our forebears is a golden treasury of kind hearts and loving devotion.   Grandmother Elizabeth Edwards Bettler evidently for years provided a home first for her mother-in-law (a widowed Swiss immigrant who spent her last years minus a leg) and then her mother, and at times the home was also shared by her sister Aline and Aline's daughter Evelyn.  My generation all marvelled at the loving care our aunt Madeline lavished on Grandmother Lizzie for so many of her last years, but unremarked by us this example had been firmly set in Madeline's early rearing.  Prior to caring for her mother Madeline had taken care of her mother-in-law Stella Winiarski Franczak, and, most sadly, rendered her last service in caring for her only daughter Jayne until she succumbed to terminal cancer.  Madeline's cousin Toodie, who had commenced mothering her baby sisters at such a young age, also later tended to her invalid father John Yount, who was wont to summon her to his bedside by pounding his cane on the wall.  In those days before welfare and Social Security, probably many families took such care of elder members because there was no choice, but I doubt that any of them did it with more grace than our kin.