Call it the Luck ‘o the Irish, Coincidence, or Fate, but in March I felt its influence. I had attended the monthly genealogy meeting in Calgary, and was interested in the appropriately themed Irish research lecture, as I have an Irish great-grandfather. I filed away the tips I learned, planning to come back to them in a few years when I had time to research that side of the family.

Instead, my current task was to refocus on some half-finished files I had set aside a few months earlier, when more pressing concerns had preempted their completion. As I have discussed here before, I search for descendants of people who worked at the now defunct Glenbow Quarry, located in Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park. The hope is that these descendants will have stories and photos to share with the Glenbow Town and Quarry Project. I picked up the file from the top of the stack and dove in.

In a couple of days, I had nearly completed the descendant tree. The hardest part, due to various privacy regulations, is locating the living descendants. I had exhausted my usual methods, so decided to see if I could find a hint in an online tree that may have been submitted about this family. Most online family trees are riddled with errors introduced by irresponsible cutting and pasting; another major problem is the almost complete absence of source citations. Still, it couldn’t hurt to see if there might be something I could use.

I did find a tree that included my Glenbow stonecutter, and a contact link to a modern descendant. Bingo! I looked for associated photos and found a family portrait of my stonecutter. Wow — it was almost too good to be true. As a final check, I skimmed through the vast number of images, in the tiny thumbnail forms. But wait, one of them seemed familiar. I opened the larger version and there on my screen was a photograph of my Irish great-grandfather’s family!

Why was Great-Grandpa Harry in someone else’s family tree? I could not find an obvious connection between the families, so I must have missed something, or maybe he had been included by mistake. There was only one way to find out.

I contacted the Glenbow descendant (Tom) and after explaining my Glenbow Project request and securing his cooperation, I ventured to confess my personal discovery and to ask for more information. He happily shared what he knew and, with the aid of a little chart, I finally  understood my link to this Glenbow family. It turns out that Tom’s Glenbow relation is on his father’s side, while my connection is on his mother’s: Tom’s 3X great-grandfather’s brother’s granddaughter married the half-brother of my great-grandfather Harry.

It may not be a direct family link to a Glenbow resident, but it is a treasured one. Years ago, we discovered that one of the team archaeologists was the great-niece of the Provincial Architect who lived and worked at Glenbow for a time, and now this. It was more than enough to incite the jealousy of my colleagues on the project. It seems my husband was justified in his complaint that I should stop researching and just finish writing The Book, or I would find out everyone was related to each other!

The only down-side of this discovery was the ensuing two-week diversion from my Glenbow tasks while I investigated my Irish ancestors…

This article was originally printed in the BERGEN NEWS and is being reprinted with permission.