We're all related...

It is so exciting to find people on Ancestry who share the same relatives.  Email exchanges between one of these newfound cousins has spiced up my research lately!  We share the same great grandmother, but he is a descendant of her first husband and I am from her second.  We have worked together through emails to solve some of the puzzles in our family tree, particularly regarding the Butlers (who are not related to me, but were close to my grandmother).

We knew that William Butler was an engineer and that he and Ida Rene lived in Lynchburg.  Another relative on Ancestry documented William's middle name as "Brown", but we have found no proof of that... yet.  If it is Brown, then there is a 1904 gravestone in Lynchburg that matches his information.  Closer inspection of a census document showed the abbreviations "Cabell, Rmt" and "So Ry".  Curious!  I googled "So Ry" and came up with Southern Railway... he was a TRAIN engineer!  The time and place made perfect sense.  I pulled up Google maps and found Cabell Street in Lynchburg... as I followed it by satellite view through the city, it crossed a main roadway called Rivermont  ("Rmt").  They must have lived at or near that intersection.  These leaps and bounds of discovery took less than five minutes!  So now I am going back and looking more closely at all of the census documents for everyone in my tree, searching for clues that I might have missed.

I spoke with my "Aunt Teeny" (Miriam Vaughan) and asked her what she knew about the Butlers.  She did not know much, but promised to contact some people who would know.  I also realize the urgency to interview certain older folks while they are still around, like Charlie Fletcher who is descended from Ida's twin, Addie.  Interesting that both Ida and Addie married men who were twenty years older than they were.  Both of these women had powerful, far-reaching influence in the family... makes me want to find out more.