It’s A Small World

It’s only been a few years since I learned that I had any ancestry in Maine. My paternal grandmother was born there but I had always incorrectly assumed she was born in Massachusetts since that’s where she was when I came on the scene. That turned out to be a bad assumption as both her parents have fairly deep Maine roots for as far as I’ve been able to trace them. I don’t know how any of them got into Maine, whether it was coming south from Canada or heading north from elsewhere in New England.

My paternal grandmother’s mother was named Helen Knight (or sometimes Fannie night; I’ve never been able to determine which was the first and which was the middle name). I learned who she was in mid-2009. Lauri mentioned that one of her mother’s best friends was named Knight and wouldn’t it be funny if I was related to them.

It turns out she was right. It I am related to them! The husband of Lauri’s mother’s best friend is my second cousin once removed. I just nailed down the connection last night. My cousin’s grandfather, Arvander Knight, is my great grandmother’s brother. Their parents were William Knight and Elizabeth Warren.

What makes this even stranger is that I was almost related to them on two lines: Knight and Marson. Arvander seemed to have bad luck with wives. He married three times. My cousin is descended from the second wife, Annie McCloud. However, Arvander’s first wife, a woman named Rose Alice Marson was the brother of John Franklin Marson. John is significant here because he married Helen Knight and the pair of them are my great grandparents.

Arvander was physically separate from Annie in both the 1900 and 1920 census (I haven’t found him in the 1910 census). By 1930 he’s in California married to his third wife. It was only by working with some information provided by my cousin’s wife that allowed me to connect Annie and Arvander together through their children’s movements. Once I had that connection everything else fell into place. We called the newly found but already known cousins and confirmed some data with them.

I found a cousin I’d met a year ago and had heard of for two years before that. If it hadn’t been for the connection between them and Lauri’s mother I’d have never known they were there to look for.

Talk about a small world!