GeniAus's Accentuate the Positive for 2025

 I like Jill Ball's (GeniAus) yearly Accentuate the Positive meme.  This year, it revolves around words.  The instructions:  "For the 2025 challenge, I have decided to move away from prompts that relate to particular situations and resources to a list focusing on our reactions to particular verbs as we reflect on our family history journey."  We are free to eliminate those words that don't relate to us, if any.  I have bolded the words so they stand out. The list:

Remember to Accentuate the Positive

2025 Prompts

1.  I treasured all the wonderful documents I found scanned online -- land records, more censuses, BMD documents, and more.

2. I shared lots of information with other members of WikiTree in building the best biographies we can produce with the best sources to back it all up. 

3. I travelled virtually.  I am no spring chicken, and I can't fly anymore due to my tendency these days to form blood clots in my legs.  I've already experienced having the clots travel to my lungs, and almost didn't survive it.  I really would rather not have a repeat performance of that. 

4. I learnt a whale of a lot about using WikiTree.  There is a lot to learn there, a rather steep learning curve.  Of course, these days, there's no printed manual, so I'm creating my own by printing out the various portions of instructions on this or that aspect of WikiTree, and putting it all in a binder.  It is so much easier for me to have instructions printed out and in my hand than it is to switch from an input screen where I'm trying to post data, to another screen where the instructions for doing this particular action are located, and then switching back again.  By the time I switch back to the input screen, I've totally forgotten what I've just read! 

5. I changed my mind about a few things when I found documentation that proved my assumptions or beliefs about an ancestor wrong.  That's why WikiTree demands and insists that we provide citations to reliable sources! 

6. I received wonderful support from the WikiTree Profile Improvement Project (PIP), which provides guidance to new WikiTree participants.  It's a self-paced way, with expert help, of learning how to use WikiTree most effectively. 

7. I conquered many of the details of WikiTree through the PIP.  It has certainly made learning all this complicated stuff not easy, but less stressful.

8. I found that I'm related to all sorts of well-known people, and have been able to document these relationships:  the actor Leslie Nielsen, one of my favorites; Thomas Jefferson (I already knew I'm related to John Adams); Maybelle Addington Carter and Alvin Pleasant Dulaney (A. P.) Carter of the Carter Family Singers. 

9. I was proud to discover, through the relationship to the Carters, above, that I am also related to a very dear friend of mine.  That was the best discovery of all, and I'm tickled pink!  When I told this friend that we are 22nd cousins, once removed, she said, "I guess that's why we have hit it off so well from the start!"  I guess so.

10.I  read Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone: The Carter Family and their Legacy in American Music, by Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg.  I was about halfway into this collective biography of the Carter family that I found out I am distantly related to them.  That made the reading of the book that much more intriguing to me.Thank you, Jill, for a great meme! 

They're Everywhere!

 Who are everywhere?  Cousins!

At the age of 60, in 2007, I decided to go back to college.  I wanted to do some genealogy research into the families of St. Augustine, Florida, which is about 36 miles from my house.  I knew my high school Spanish from all those decades ago would not be sufficient to understand and translate the documents I would encounter.  I ended up with a double post-baccalaureate major in Spanish and history.  And in one of those Spanish classes, there was a fine bear of a young man.  He sat on the opposite side of the classroom from me.  

The discussion was about kinship, in a broad sense, and our professor, Dr. Jorge Febles, used an expression that did not translate well in the literal sense into English.  I got the drift, however, and was about to give the English equivalent that Dr. Febles was asking us for:  The apple don't fall far from the tree, a phrase taught to me by a dear friend from the Appalachians.  Before I could say it, the phrase came from the bear of a young man, whose surname was Bowers.  

After class, I said to him, "You're from the Appalachians, aren't you?" 

"Yes, ma'am, I shore am," he said.

I asked him if he had any kin of a certain surname, and he said he didn't think so.   When I got home, I called my friend from the Appalachians, Amanda, thinking young Bowers might be related to her.  I asked her if she had any Bowers people in her lineage.  She didn't think so.

The next week, I received in the mail a book I had been waiting for -- Teter Nave, East Tennessee Pioneer: His Ancestors and Descendants, by Robert T. Nave and Margaret W. Houghland.  I was eager to look for my Nave kin, my mother's line, and I found a great-great grandfather whose name startled me:  John Teter Bowers Nave.  Maybe it wasn't Amanda young Bowers was related to.  Maybe it was me.

 The next class, I told young Bowers about my great-grandfather John Teter Bowers Nave, and he said, "Oh, yeah, we've got Teters and Naves all over the family!"  

Lately, I had found indications that I was related to the famous Carter family of country music, both to Maybelle Addington Carter, the "Mother Maybelle" of the Carter Family Singers, and to her brother-in-law Alvin Pleasant Dulaney (A. P.) Carter, leader of the troupe, country music songwriter, and "song-catcher" of the Appalachian Mountains.  My friend Amanda has connections to that family, and it made me grin at the idea that we might be cousins.

And indeed we are -- 16th cousins once removed.

Next year, it will be forty years I've known Amanda.  Never, until the recent revelations, did I suspect we may be kin.

Tread softly, friends.  You never know.  That stranger sitting next to you in the theater might be your cousin.