Why I like the Internet

Above: my great-great-grand-father Wilhelm Schulz with wife Albertina Pett and their 7 children.

I had the great suprise and luck to be pinged by Karen Schulz Ibaceta yesterday by email. She found me just by googling “Schulz in Chile”. Karen is the daughter of Dr. Ronald Schulz Grangier, who’s my mom’s distant cousin, and who is the doc who delivered me, ie. the first person to ever see me…  What a surprise.

Karen lives in Bath, UK, as she recently got married there. We spent a couple of hours last night by IM (I have a voice extinction, so I can’t talk since yesterday morning), and added lots of information from her family’s side + names + pictures.

This kind of odd connection happens to me all the time. I have established links to cousins in Brasil, Canada, Australia, Germany, without ever having met them. Tools such as the Internet with VoIP, fast file transfer, IM, search engines, genealogy hosting sites have enabled these conversations that otherwise would almost never have existed.

So I’m glad I’ve been involved professionally on the net for the past 15 years, and with genealogy for the past 25. By the way, the links to names do work, but they are reserved to members of my family and friends who have the password: just to protect the names of those people born less than a 100 years ago.

And for the curious of you out there, as far as I know, we have no link to Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the Snoopy cartoon, although his family came from Berlin too.