EVERYBODY'S GOT A COUSIN IN.....

Jimmy Buffet wrote a song called "Everybody's Got a Cousin in Miami"about the Latin-American influx to that region of Florida.  I may have mentioned it before in a previous blog (I don't remember because I have not posted for a long time) but I could write a song called " I've Got a Cousin Who's a Cossack."  About 8 months ago I was contacted by some guy out of the blue who claimed to be related to me somehow.  In this age of Phishing and internet scams at first I was suspicious, then skeptical, then intrigued, and now excited about the prospect of a whole branch of my family I never knew existed until now.  It seems that Cuz Fred has had a life that had quite a few similarities to my own.  His grandfather and my grandfather were brothers, which is a pretty solid start to a common thread.  He is highly educated and had an interesting career in science as did I.  We shared many childhood memories of folks we both knew but yet with all that,  we did not know one another.  My grandfather died before I was born.  But, I still wonder why my father did not hook up the two branches of the family when both lived in the New York-Jersey metropolitan area.  Maybe it was something someone said, once.  That's the way things sometimes happen... just a guess.  There was that pesky ethnicity-hiding thing that happened back then were folks named Cohen changed their names to Coggan, or Wincheski became Wilson.

Getting back to the Cossack thing.  This guy on horseback above is not my cousin, but it could be one of my ancestors.  Some of them were from what is now known as Belarus, previously known as White Russia.  Relatives were definitely Cossacks and in the Czar's Guard.  I always suspected I came from a warrior archetype especially considering my military and police experiences.  Well, I have not met Cousin Fred yet but we correspond on the phone and via email. Perhaps we can stop by to visit on our way through Charleston later this year.  I bought a copy of Family Tree Maker software and have migrated Fred's data into it.  Surprisingly, my kids are interested in family history.  When I was a kid, I was interested too but I always got shut down since in those days, immigrants tried to be American and avoid hyphenization of their ethnicities. They tried to learn the English language too and discouraged the children from learning the tongue of their parent's native land. That was both good and bad.  Today, my grandkids will all be bilingual at least, and trilingual if Mandarin is made available  I am reminded of the cartoon I saw a while back.  These two bearded men, islamic terrorists, were talking.  One said to the other..."Achmed, you are in America, speak spanish."  More to come.....