Research task

The new year started with a fairly slow week at work, since Swedes celebrate Twelfth Day. We had Tuesday off from work, so it wasn't a full week.

Last weekend I got a research task that was very tricky. It was about a Gray family on Long Island, and the information to start with was meagre. Gray is a very common surname also. But with the help of an Ancestry.com subscription and several long distance and international phone calls, the American relatives were found after three days of extensive research. They were very surprised to hear from their Swedish cousins, especially since the contact between the families was broken over 60 years ago. The cousins who once played together on Long Island now got to talk to each other again many decades later. Part of the family had moved back to Sweden in the 1940s, and then lost contact with the ones who stayed. It's yet another of these tragic stories I get to hear fairly often. I'm glad it was a successful ending to this one.

The readers of this blog already knows that my mother is accident prone. (This is a mystery to her family members, by the way). She now lives in Borås and had decided to take the bus downtown yesterday. It seems like the driver got suddenly sick and ran into and damaged several parked cars along the street. This was very upsetting to the passengers, and several of them were quite shocked, but physically unharmed. My mother became shocked also, but managed to stay calm. She commented on it and said something about being used to accidents.....