Six degrees indeed...
Yesterday my sister Laura posted on Facebook that "her nephew Dan's stepson Greg" had been found, as per this story.
I'm not clear how she has a nephew named Dan who isn't also my nephew unless this is through her new husband, Howard, who may have a sibling who is Dan's parent. So she'd have a double connection through marriage--her marriage to Howard and Dan's marriage to Greg's mother.
Then it got weird: today my Uncle George sent me an email with a link to the same article, and this time I read it more carefully, noting that Greg's mother's name is Christine Stackhouse. I'm a Stackhouse on my mom's side and Uncle George is my mother's brother (one of nine, though three are now deceased), so I assume that my Uncle George's interest in sending this link to family members is that we're somehow related to Christine Stackhouse. However, I have 28 first cousins on my mother's side of the family, most of them named Stackhouse and most of them married and having produced children, some of them having grandchildren by this time. If any of my first cousins named a daughter Christine I'm not remembering it. (She's too old to be a granddaughter of one of my cousins--even my oldest great-nephew is just a little younger than my daughter.) And if she's related through more distant cousins (my grandfather's nieces and nephews) I'm completely unaware of the specific connection.
So I'm just pondering this before going to bed, how weird it is that I may have two different connections, one by blood and one by marriage, to what has become a somewhat well-known international case of kidnapping, but I don't actually personally know anyone involved. I am glad the boys have been found, though. What a hair-raising time their poor mothers must have had!
Maybe I'll drop Uncle George a line tomorrow and ask what degree of cousin Christine is to me...
I'm not clear how she has a nephew named Dan who isn't also my nephew unless this is through her new husband, Howard, who may have a sibling who is Dan's parent. So she'd have a double connection through marriage--her marriage to Howard and Dan's marriage to Greg's mother.
Then it got weird: today my Uncle George sent me an email with a link to the same article, and this time I read it more carefully, noting that Greg's mother's name is Christine Stackhouse. I'm a Stackhouse on my mom's side and Uncle George is my mother's brother (one of nine, though three are now deceased), so I assume that my Uncle George's interest in sending this link to family members is that we're somehow related to Christine Stackhouse. However, I have 28 first cousins on my mother's side of the family, most of them named Stackhouse and most of them married and having produced children, some of them having grandchildren by this time. If any of my first cousins named a daughter Christine I'm not remembering it. (She's too old to be a granddaughter of one of my cousins--even my oldest great-nephew is just a little younger than my daughter.) And if she's related through more distant cousins (my grandfather's nieces and nephews) I'm completely unaware of the specific connection.
So I'm just pondering this before going to bed, how weird it is that I may have two different connections, one by blood and one by marriage, to what has become a somewhat well-known international case of kidnapping, but I don't actually personally know anyone involved. I am glad the boys have been found, though. What a hair-raising time their poor mothers must have had!
Maybe I'll drop Uncle George a line tomorrow and ask what degree of cousin Christine is to me...