Some Harlan questions resolved

 

Over the past few days I've managed to track down a few questions of my own regarding some of my Harlan ancestors and relations, which I've documented here:  https://sites.google.com/view/johnbelatharlan/harlan-relationships -- specifically my relationship to three famous Harlans, the two John Marshall Harlans of United States Supreme Court fame, and Josiah Harlan, of 19th century Afghanistan fame.

Some new items now draw my curiosity:

• Josiah's descendants, namely the line descending from his only (Alpheus-documented) child, daughter Sarah Victoria (1852-?) (#3732), who was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and on 25 May 1870 married Frank Stokes.  Josiah was my fourth cousin, six times removed;  his daughter was my fifth cousin, five times removed.  Someday I'll figure out how that all works -- maybe :-)
• Somewhere in the line I stumbled over a male Harlan who led the "George Washington Movement," which appears to have been the initiative to found George Washington University in DC.  Stupidly I neglected to jot it down, so I need to retrace my steps to relocate it.
• Which line my former Oxford, Ohio neighbor John descends from.

 

Late to the party but never too late

 

No doubt many of us came late to the family history party, acquiring our taste for ancestral exploration only after our grandparents and parents had passed away, possibly leaving us photographs, note cards and books, and family tree diagrams we may have seen and dismissed without interest in previous decades but in which we can now lose ourselves for hours at a time.

In the decade and a half since my mother died and I came into possession of the voluminous notes she and her father compiled during their lifetimes, I have divided my time between marveling at the wealth of meticulous research they conducted and documented, and kicking myself for not having appreciated and acquired the taste for genealogy earlier in life, when I could have shared it with them.

The further I delve into the riches left to me, the more I marvel at what my mother and grandfather accomplished -- and all without the benefit of electronically stored and accessible information and the now-standard resources of the Internet.  Feeding the fruit of my mother and grandfather's labor into the modern tools of family history, I'm amazed both by the accuracy of the information they assembled and by the labor intensity it involved.  Invariably I think about how much more they, or the three of us combined, could accomplish today with today's tools, and tomorrow's.