How I first met my lost cousins

Meeting the first five of my lost cousins a couple of years ago on a trip back to the UK was a truly amazing experience but I am sharing how it came about for two reasons that I hope will encourage other members in their search. First of all let me say, however that even finding one lost cousin was a big deal as I am the only child of parents who both grew up as only children and with very few relatives they ever kept in touch with, the only cousin my father knew of died in a a POW camp in WW II. My father died when I was a teenager and my paternal grandmother, the last link with his family shortly before I turned 21. It was over 40 years before I paid serious attention to my family tree and to begin with it was very much hit and miss.
I knew that I had one ancestor on my father's side who had been the captain of a light ship off the coast of Yarmouth but it was only as I started to look at census information etc. that I realised that he was my gggf. It was obvious that he had sailed extensively and I eventually found out that he had written a notebook about his travels (1831-1875) that ended up being donated to the Norfolk County archives in Norwich.The lady who donated it was elderly and thought there was no one else who was related to the captain, she wanted to remain anonymous so that part is still a mystery. The notebook isn't very interesting when it comes to his travels but what has proved very useful is a lot of family information that he recorded. I share this to encourage anyone who has old memorabilia to donate it or a copy to a local archive.
The second reason is that based on finding out about the notebook I posted the information to a special interest web site and eventually another cousin ( with the same gggf) got in contact with me and that is how I met up with her and other cousins. So I also encourage anyone donating or knowing of a hidden treasure in an archive to post a note to an appropriate special interest website.