Tangents

It's been three months since my last post, but I've not been ignoring genealogy. I went off on a tangent recently. Here's what happened. My parents were invited for dinner with their friends the M****s. My mother dutifully sent a thank-you note on her Crane's stationery engraved with Mrs. Stephen Viele Lewis II on the front side. Her friend Liz later remarked that she and my father must be related somehow because she is a Viele and he is a Viele and all the Vieles in upstate New York are related. Well, I took that as a challenge. I had never had any connection to other Vieles outside my own immediate family. I started with the precious little I knew and directly came up short. I thought about starting from what I know of the Vieles and working forward. It was useless, however, to follow the strands of my Viele line out in all directions searching for Liz Viele. I went back and forth with my mother, who would relay my questions to her friend Liz, who, like my mother, is in her 80s. My mother would scribble down some notes in her faltering handwriting, since she can't see very well. Then my father would read me my mother's notes over the phone. And nobody's memory is very good any more so the conversations would have boiled down to a few words on a scrap of paper. ["Stephen, can you read this to me again?"] I'd get snippets of information in each phone call, a last name of a grandfather, a place where a grandmother was supposed to be from, a list of so-and-so married so-and-so but I can't remember whether these were her grandparents or her great-grandparents. Or on her mother's side or her father's side. Hmmm. Not going to be easy. My mother asked, "How do you know if you get on a wrong track?" Well, with so little information to go on, you basically can't hope for much. My mother told me, "Her father's name was Howard." OK, I dutifully plugged Howard into my genealogy software. Nothing. After some searching around, I did find a Harold. I asked my mother, "Is her father's name Harold by any chance?" "Yes," she said, "I knew that. That's what I said." Un-huh. In another conversation, I found out about a grandfather, Frederick Viele, of Glens Falls.

Eventually, after several false starts, I got lucky.  As Tim says, "Bingos don't just happen. You have to be ready for them." I found a link to Google Books for "The Fort Edward Book," in which the search engine had found a mention of a Fred Viele. Fred C Viele apparently owned a drug store in Glens Falls. The book said that Fred was the great grandson of Barney Viele, who was well known to the author as a prominent citizen of Fort Miller, NY. And Barney was descended through a long line of Vieles all the way back to Aernoud Viele, the 17th century interpreter between the Dutch and the Iroquois. Aernoud was the son of Cornelis Volkertsen Viele, the first of the Viele line to arrive on these shores from Holland in 1636. Vieles were some of the earliest settlers of New Amsterday (Manhattan), Schenectady, and Schaghticoke. Cornelis is MY ancestor, through Aernoud's brother, Lowis Viele. Finally, the relationship came clear. Cornelis Volkertsen Viele is the 8th great grandfather of both my father and their friend Liz. Our families ARE related, but the tie goes back to the mid-17th century.

I cleaned up the genealogy file for Liz and exported some snazzy documents listing the descendants of Cornelis Volkertsen Viele all the way down to Liz. And one listing Liz's ancestors all the way back to Cornelis. And finally a "kinship" list, showing how she is related to each person in the genealogy file. This last one shows that Cornelis is her 8th great grandfather. I sent it all off to my parents with the request that they print it all out and give it to Liz. She may not even give a crap but at least her kids can stash it all away someplace and then someday if somebody cares they can dig it out again and get some laughs at what a PhD geologist and cancer patient in New Mexico, with nothing better to do, spent the better part of a week figuring out.