We Are All Connected
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| Image by Vilkasss from Pixabay |
WE ARE
ALL CONNECTED
I joined The South King County Genealogical Society years ago to learn about genealogy. The Society held a monthly meeting featuring educational speakers at a nearby church. It did not occur to me that I would meet people with similar interests who would become friends. I certainly didn’t realize that I would connect with relatives.
It is a long-standing joke in the South King County Genealogical Society that MaryLynn Strickland is related to everyone. I am sure that I am related to her through the Dyer family in Colonial America.
Recently, I hosted a social get-together for SKCGS volunteers. The group included members who had recently joined, as well as long-time members. I mentioned to one of the newer members that I had learned through a study group in which we had participated that our ancestors had married during the Revolutionary War era. At that moment, a very new member offered that she too was related to that family. Who knew? Here were three 21st-century genealogists in Washington State related through Pennsylvania ancestors in the 1700s. None of us had met in person before that day.
Research into social networks, or “Small World Theory”, has been going on for a long time. The study I am most familiar with was an experiment conducted by social psychologist and Yale professor Stanley Milgram in 1967. Milgram distributed parcels addressed to a target in Boston to 160 people who did not know the target, with instructions to send it to someone they did know who might have a connection to the target. It took from two hops to ten hops for the package to reach the target, with the average being close to six.[1]
I currently reside in a Senior Community of about 500 residents. The residents are all over 62, overwhelmingly white, well-educated, and retired. Many have traveled extensively. Most have lived for a good part of their lives in the Pacific Northwest. Therefore, it is not surprising that we have extensive social networks in this area. There are still surprises, though!
Recently, I was eating lunch with a new resident with whom I did not seem to share any acquaintances outside the community, when she dropped into the conversation that she had grown up in a small community in the Yakima Valley, Grandview. I said, “Oh, my father’s family settled in Grandview.” It did not take us long to discover that our fathers had probably gone to high school together and that she had known two of my aunts.
As a result of this connection, we are now closer than we would have been for a long time of casual meetings in the dining room or activities. I will possibly learn about aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Let people know that you are interested in their family history. You never know who they might relate to. We are all connected.
[1] Aamir Shahzad ,Understanding the Six Degrees of Separation Theory, educative (https://www.educative.io/blog/understanding-six-degrees-of-separation: accessed 22 September 2025).
Disclaimer at the start: this is not a standard "three brothers" story! No one has ever claimed, to my knowledge, that everyone with the surname in the US is descended from the three of them.
ReplyDeleteAny, the Messenger brothers came to the US in Colonial times. My grandparents' minister and good friend was related to one of them, and it turned out that my ex-wife is related to another.
It gets better, though! When I was working in Chicago, one of our IT guys was related to one of the three brothers. Then, to top it off, we were interviewing a new consultant and I was the one doing the "cultural fit" part. Turns out she was also interested in genealogy, so we spent 3 hours talking, during which time I learned that she, too, was related to one of the three brothers.
I don't have my records here at the office, but the four connections included all three brothers; I just don't remember which brother belonged to which of the people I knew. Small world, indeed!