Long Lost Rellies

Yesterday I was contacted by a distant cousin who had, some time ago, found me on my family tree most of which is online  -  but that is another story.


My cousin and I share a common great-great grandfather but we are descended from different wives and interestingly we are both descended through the male lines and both retained the common surname.  She is a half third cousin.


Anyway, she lives quite close and she and her husband were in the shopping centre to buy something from Zoo  (the ultimate petless pet shop) so she phoned me and we met there  -  more sensible than trying to recognise strangers in the main shopping arcade.  Like me she is interested in craftwork and  we have both worked at the same hospital. 


She is also interested in genealogy and I was able to furnish her with the descendant line from 1608 which encompasses both our families but my tree mostly has information from a different branch of her line.  Women commonly died during childbirth so many families had a common father but two or more mothers/stepmothers.  Because I had a contact from a descendant of her great grandfather's first wife and she is descended from the second I had less knowledge of her line.  Hopefully that can now be rectified because I don't have the BMD records from any state but South Australia and her family are here in Western Australia.


And here is where I do a grizzle about Family Tree Maker.  I have version 2014 on this computer and it refuses to sync with Ancestry.com.  Searching my CDs I find that I have the CD for FTM 2016 but that flatly refuses to load itself, citing 'errors'.  Looking online for some assistance I have found that this seems to be a common problem and I suspect that it is the reason I am unable to download Windows 10 since its excuse is incompatible programs installed on this computer.  I'll have one more try at downloading it now that I have backed everything up and if that fails I will contact Techie.  I want to be able to preserve FTM, the hard copy of my web page (which I can save to a flash drive) and my family history file which I have already saved to a flash drive.  The rest I can rebuild if necessary and maybe a cleanout will be a good thing.