If you want to contact Ron, there is a place to do that as well. Enjoy! Below is how Ron and I connected just a few short days ago.
A while ago, I said I was doing some genealogy work on my mother's side of the family. I wasn't having much luck!
My brother, Doug, had seen a tv show about DNA testing few years ago, and he said he would really like to do it -- but it was very expensive. Then somehow I discovered that 23 and Me was doing genetic testing for $99, and that there was more information available for males in a family than for females. I sent Doug the information and told him that if he was still interested, I would pay for half. I was hoping it might lead to relatives of my mother's grandmother on her mother's side as we knew so very little about her parents. All we knew about her was that she had my grandmother, and immigrated from Sweden. Her husband remarried 3 years later -- and my great-grandmother disappeared. My great-grandfather's name was Nels Nelson from Sweden (and that's all we knew -- any idea of how many Nels Nelsons there were in Sweden -- it's like how many Jones families are in America!)
Since then, I've connected with two of my mother's father's relatives in Sweden and they've been sending me information and doing research for me, verifying what I've got right and what I've got wrong.
Then I connected with a granddaughter of my maternal grandmother's half-brother, and she gave me what little information she had and I shared photos of her grandfather that I had in my possession and told her what I knew. And nothing happened for months.
In the middle of last week, somebody copied one of the Nelson photos in that family and I recognized the name as the husband of another member of the Nelson family. I sent a message off and was informed that he would send the information on to his wife by email. To make a long story short, Debbie, who is the daughter of a first cousin once removed, contacted me and we exchanged information -- her dad was a little skeptical because he didn't remember me. This changed when I sent them a photo of his father, my mother, and him; along with everything I knew about my maternal grandmother's family. Her dad and her mother went to the Negaunee cemetery and collected dates off of the stones. So more of the family information came in.
Then another family tree came up with information about Grandma's sister Aunt Ida's family, but our Great-Grandparent's name was spelled Aquist instead of Ekquist. I sent her a message that if she was having problems finding information, that was why.
Doug sent me information last week about relatives that 23 and Me said were second cousins. Turns out one of them was Ron Osterberg, the grandson of Aunt Ida Osterberg; and the other was Dale, the grandson of Roy Krans, and the son of Rita.
The Krans relatives are getting together for lunch tomorrow in Green Bay -- but it's 4-1/2 hours one way and I don't have anyone to ride along with me, so unfortunately I won't be there. I have found more information in a book written about Krans relatives in a book about Aurora, and I will be sharing some of this with you soon.
Information has started to explode from all sides of my large wonderful extended family. Information is coming at me so quickly from all directions. it's difficult keeping it all straight and trying to make sense of it all.
And all this leads up to -- I would like to introduce you to Ron Osterberg who lives in Connecticut. He is our second cousin and he's quite a writer and he writes from his heart!
http://www.bhosterberg.com/Ron/
If you want to contact Ron, there is a place to do that as well. Enjoy!
