Making the Most of Quarantine Time: Connecting with New Cousins in Far Away Places

(Thanks to StLGS volunteer, Kathy Franke, for sharing this interesting story about the importance of having some of our genealogy online so others can find us and of not throwing away those mystery photographs. We know many of you are sifting through old family photos during this time of quarantine. Maybe you, too, will be lucky enough to identify and learn more about someone in your own family album.)

Kathy writes:

I have a box of photos that were handed down to my grandma, then to my dad, and then to me. In the middle of that sequence, they got transported to my aunt’s house about forty-five minutes away, in a rural area of Missouri. They were left there for years and finally I went to pick them up. My aunt said she was going to throw some away because she did not know who was in some of the pictures, so why keep them? I think she pitched some from her collection, but I have a large box. I have separated them into groups of people I know and by generation and people I do not have any idea about. During all of this, I’ve kept them together in one box (an archival quality one). That way, I’ll know the provenance of the group.

Flash forward to last week. I received a message through Ancestry's messaging service from a man named Paul Jadot. He found my 2nd great-grandmother, Agnes Sondag (pictured here on the left), in my online tree. His great-grandmother, Marguerite "Gretchen" Sondag, was Agnes’s first cousin. Agnes came to St. Louis after the Civil War but Gretchen stayed in Belgium. Paul was born and grew up in Belgium, speaks Dutch, French, German, and English and has done a lot of research on the Sondag family. He now lives in the U.S. We had a great phone call that lasted more than an hour this morning and we now have a ton of new things to add to our To-Do lists.

Tonight I went to that box of Grandma's photos to find one that I wanted to send to Paul of a man in a white uniform from the Belgian Congo in 1916. The name of the man in the photo is Paul Crélot and the card is signed in French, "your nephew." I have not done much research on this side of my family so was not familiar with the Crélot surname. It turns out that Paul Jadot has Crélot in his tree and Agnes Sondag’s sister married a Crélot who had several children!

Here is the note from my new cousin Paul:

"What a find! I admit that I'm not too proud of the colonial experience of Belgium in the Congo. The country is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, (DRC). The capital is Kinshasa. It's a country in constant turmoil. It is eighty times bigger than Belgium."

Paul also translated the caption on the lower left of the front of the photo: Leó le 1r Mars 1914 Congo Belge—he abbreviates the city of Leopoldville as Leó in the Belgian Congo where the picture was taken on 1 March 1914.  Leopoldville was the capital of the then-colony. Note: In August of 1914, Germany invaded Belgium and the Belgian colonial army fought against German colonial troops located at the eastern border of the Congo.

I'm so glad I kept these photos and could learn this new information!