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USERS HAVE ACCESSED THIS PAGE SINCE MAY 16, 1997.

Imagine losing your family by accident.

Twenty-five years ago that actually happened to young lady by the name of Deirdre Irene Sterner.

`Dee' travelled to England and liked it so much over there that she decided to find permanent residence. There she met and married an Englishman named Ken McIntosh. They lived here in the States for about a year, but then they moved back to England. That was in 1970.

Twenty-five years ago I was just a tike who knew nothing of Deirdre nor cared who she might be. My concerns laid with more important things...like with teddy bears, toys, and watching a strange, green, pointy-eared Vulcan and, for that matter, a little boy named Will Robinson save the Universe on TV. (Occasionally there was this really annoying interruption of the programming that went on blathering something about `men on the moon' -- which seemed comparatively inconsequential next to the aforementioned heros' exploits at the time.)

After Dee's move away to England, many of the family members whom she used to know so well had moved to new locations and so, her address book was made outdated. As well, by unfortunate circumstance, each and every one of these family members had either misplaced or mis-wrote Dee's mailing address. Each thought it okay, as the other one would surely have her address when needed, and so there was really nothing to worry greatly about. Right?

Wrong. For twenty-five years, Dee was lost.

Then one day, twenty years later, my father encouraged me to follow him in his research of the family. He was having a terrible time trying to prove certain elusive relationships and decided he needed help, and so pestered me to no end until I eventually gave in. [No offense Dad.] After a time, I became rather `incessantly obsessed' with the new hobby -- as I usually do with all my hobbies for some reason. Thus I had been initiated into the new world of `genealogy.'

Reaching pretty much a dead-end in our Sherman line at the time (actually, neither of us got very much farther on it because the needed information just wasn't in the easy forthcoming), I turned my interest to the other lines of the family: the DISBROWs, the GREGORYs, the TOLMIEs...the STERNERs. It was then that I noticed -- I mean really actually noticed -- my grandfather's old books sitting there on the bookshelves in my grandmother's home.

`Oh! What a godsend!' I thought to myself, `...to have such maps already drawn out for me by a man whom I only barely remember now, but still fondly, and who died so long ago when I was nine.' This man's name was Jay Willard Sterner.

It was in reading Grandpa's books that I first came across mentions of Dee's family.

I discovered that before my grandfather had met and married my grandmother (Muriel Gregory), he had a previous marriage in 1919 to a woman named Hazel Irene Taylor. Together, they had a son in 1923 and named him Jay Willard Sterner, Jr. Jay, Jr. married Edna May Worth in 1946, and in 1948 they had a little girl named Deirdre Irene Sterner.

In 1934, Hazel died, unfortunately, and a few years later Jay, Sr. met and married Muriel. They had two little girls named Jane (now Jones) born in 1937, and Lydia (now Sherman) born in 1940. It is from the latter daughter in this second line that I, myself, descend. ...Follow?

So...Jane and my mother would be Dee's...`half-aunts.'

I didn't know her, much less know what she looked like -- aside from a twenty-five-year-old fuzzy thing found in a newspaper clipping about her wedding that someone had; but Dee became an obsession for me. My mother and her sister could both tell me stories about growing up with her, but noone could give me any information that would help me actually locate her. At that time, I had a birthday, but no year. I had only a guess for a birth locale. I had a last known location in NJ, but noone knew within what city in England she currently resided, much less what her current mailing address was. I knew she married a `Ken McIntosh' from that old newspaper clipping about the marriage; but was she still married to him? Had she married again -- now with yet another new last name to confound me? The last rumor had it that she had divorced Ken long ago. Hmm. It seemed like a probable futile endeavor trying to locate her. Maybe the family of my grandfather's brother, Edwin Donald Sterner might know? They did not. Sigh! Woe is me!

I knew there was a family there to put on the tree, but what little information I had made it look so obviously and pathetically incomplete and bare, and I wasn't even sure about what I did have. Was there more, still? Did Dee have a family that should have it's place there under her own name? I wanted to know and it drove me crazy. I had to fill in those blanks. I can't stand incompleteness. With me, everything has to be finished or I am not satisfied. (Is that what they mean by a `completist?' or is that something else?)

Anyway, in 1995, I was about to give up hope. I'd tried all the means available to me and had come up empty-handed. Nothing was working. Noone could remember, much less find anything, or knew of anyone to refer me to. Then I had this wonderful, if not perhaps silly, little idea.

With the advent of HTML, I'd been wanting to retranscribe my grandfather's documents for use on a PC anyway -- with the photos -- and it hit me that I could also make this effort not just available to the immediate local family, but also to the rest of the world. At the same time, maybe Dee has Internet access. Maybe one day she'll type in her maiden name...just for the heck of it, and find my pages... find us again.

T'was a futile thought. But it was the only option that I could think of that was left yet. I didn't really expect to hear from Dee anytime soon from this, or if I would ever hear from her at all. In the meantime, at least the world could enjoy my grandfather's prose.

So I put my grandfather's two family genealogies up on the Web. I wasn't able to add the photos as I'd originally intended because the total combined filesize just made it unfeasable. But the text made it to the web okay.

That was around August or September of 1995.

Then one day in February 1996, I was bored to death with nothing to do, and so I logged onto the net to see if I'd received any new e-mail.

...There they all sat in my cue, staring me in the face. About twenty or so ad-mails and maybe one or two personal messages. I just hit the ENTER key and began reading the first message in the line. One by one, I reamed through the mail with my bored face squished in one hand, the other hand tapping the delete key, scrolling through and removing what was mostly junk mail. I'd been hitting the delete key so many times that I'd eventually ended up in something of a trance-like state.

As I deleted the last letter and was ready to exit there came a beep. `Darn it! Just as I'm ready to log off here I get yet another piece of junk mail!' Ready at the delete key, I quickly scanned the new document...

...Something about `tears,' `lost you,' `family,' `so glad I found you'...

`...What's this stupid ad talking abo... ...Oh.....OH!!!.....Omigawd!!!!... It's DEE!!! I found her!'

[...begin score from `Steel Magnolias'...] 8-)

I responded immediately, worried that she might log off for the evening before I finished reading. I sent out an effective `Hold on! I'm here' message and went back to finish reading the original. At this point we began what is now a regular, almost daily correspondence.

I discovered in my correspondence with her that she had indeed had two children of her own: Tabitha (`Tabby') and Christopher (`Chris'), who were themselves going through college, and about to graduate. Dee had become a teacher, of course. She married one, as well. She missed the family so, and was ever so tearfully happy to be able to read her grandfather's works online.

I notified my mother and her sister Jane immediately, as well as other family members, that Dee had been located.

My idea had worked. I couldn't believe it; but it had worked. It was an impossible idea; but still, it worked! We'd finally found The Long Lost Dee.

One night Dee had apparently come home from work somewhat depressed about the long day just experienced, and thinking about her lost ties to the family if I remember correctly her telling me. She turned on the computer and accessed the Internet and, at some point, decided to stop by the `Alta Vista' search engine and did a search for her grandfather's name...just for the heck of it. (Deja vu?) She didn't really expect much would come of it. She surely had no idea that what would pop up before her very eyes would be pointers to page after page of her grandfather's very own family works....ONLINE!

[...Would somebody please turn off that music now?...]

And the miracle stretches farther still...

Think about it: How many people in any given family today actually end up with a full fledged interest in researching the family's surnames? In reality? honestly? Not many, unfortunately. The excitement just isn't there today. If you try to talk genealogy with most of the populace you'll usually end up with a wide yawn three minutes into the conversation and/or someone interrupting in an effort to try to save the conversation, I'm afraid. As well, if you try to quiz the family a week later on what was earlier discussed they'll usually end up with an `F'-grade. So, finding family members just isn't the number one priority of most people.

It did matter to me, however -- if not but because of my father's own original persistance that I get involved in genealogy. And because of that, Dee is again connected with our family. But, had there not been all those fortunate coincidences preceding, this might not have happened.

Speaking of coincidences....It was fifty years ago to the month that Dee and I had found each other that our grandfather had originally published the very books which played such a part in finding her in the end.

So, in closing, I guess I should state the moral of this story:

`Never throw away your address book until you're sure you've copied all of the info to someplace else. If you don't, you might end up having to retranscribe your whole family history and place it up on the World Wide Web.'

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