Meeting a 6th cousin - in Hawaii!

Meeting my cousins in Brisbane and Hawaii…

Perhaps everyone researching their Family Tree finds someone who becomes a ‘favourite’. My paternal grandmother’s mother, Jane Eleanor Reay (1834-1906), member of a Durham mining family, is mine. A pastry cook and confectioner, Jane Eleanor was widowed three times and brought up seven children before dying in the workhouse of ’senile decay’. In 2010 I was thrilled to meet other descendants of the same family in Australia and Hawaii.

Jane Eleanor’s brother emigrated to Australia, and in Brisbane I met the grandson named for him, Edward. My travelling companion remarked that from the moment we met Edward and I ‘clicked’, perhaps, as they say, ‘blood will out’. We also met Edward’s 90 year old mother, Jane Eleanor’s great niece.

Edward and his wife were enormously hospitable, insisted on putting us up, driving us to the coast, taking us to a zoo and the theatre - and recommending things for us to do when we were not with them. Edward is the first to admit he is not a great correspondent but we are in touch if either of us finds something new in the relevant Family Tree.

Annette, in Hawaii, came by car to take us out for the day. She remarked almost immediately that sharing 5 x great grandparents was so remote it hardly mattered, but I was quick to point out that if we didn’t have that family link she would not be taking us out at that moment. We had a lovely day together, seeing parts of Honolulu we would not have seen without her, and as Annette invited us home to meet her husband in the evening she reached up and pulled the pins out of her neat bun, letting her hair down: we were accepted!. Annette is better at keeping in touch and we all met in Bath at the end of last year before they went up to Durham to walk in the Reay family’s footsteps.

(please note that I have not used the correct names of living people)