Amazing good luck [View All]

[LiberalEsto]

I still can't believe it. I am just about walking on air.

I've been trying to trace some of my mother's family for years. Decades.
My mom was an only child and died when I was 23, so I never got to ask her much about her family. Her mother died when I was 2 so I was too young to remember her. Mom's father died behind the Iron Curtain when I was a kid. My parents were immigrants from Estonia.

I had very little information about her parents or grandparents. But when we got internet, I started Googling my mother's grandmother's name and posting it on ancestry boards. Never got a response. Tried alternate spellings - nada. Every year or two I checked the search engines again.


Yesterday I was trying different spellings and got a hit! My great-grandparents' names are spelled a little differently, but I'm positive I found the right people on a genealogy site called GENI. I emailed the person who had posted the information and am hoping he will get back to me.

Not only that, but there was info on ancestors going back to 1716.

I also looked up info on my dad's family. He had lots of relatives and some of them had posted family stuff on GENI. A total gold mine for me.

Then I Googled an alternate spelling for my mother's father's family and found a delicious bit on info on my great-grandfather, who was a noted Russian Orthodox priest and university professor of religion. I know some info on him but had never heard this anecdote.

His university in Estonia was celebrating an anniversary in 1903 and the faculty decided to hand out a number of honorary degrees to people who had major achievements. One of them was the noted writer Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, etc. My priestly great-grandfather adamantly argued against honoring Tolstoy on the grounds that he was atheist. (Tolstoy has been described as a Christian anarchist).

Instead, he submitted the names of three priests that nobody else had ever heard of, for honorary degrees. The faculty voted to compromise by honoring Tolstoy and one of the priests. However the chosen priest wrote back that he declined the honor because he didn't want his name to appear with Tolstoy's name.

It amazes me that I could plug away year after year and get only tiny bits of information, and then suddenly encounter such a tremendous amount of information in just one day.