If Mistakes Were Haystacks
by Donald Jack MacDonald
My e-mail address is windwalker8@netscape.net
and I live in Hemet California.
For the last fifty-eight
years I have been searching for my
fathers family and ancestral roots.
My mother died in 1938
and I was placed under foster care of the Saskatchewan
Government in 1940.
During the intervening years I have searched vital records,
libraries and newspapers for my father or the one name
that I recalled a John MacDonald, brother to my father
Angus Gillis MacDonald. I did know he was born in Nova
Scotia Canada, but that was all.
For the last four years have been dilligently searching the
internet genealogy forums and family web pages. On february
14th of this year, I was once again going through a Cape
Breton website, when I saw the Thorpe family site, one I
had dissmissed as being irrelevant to my search. This time
I entered it and found one MacDonald:
Immediately I wrote William Thorpe an e-letter!
The following day came a reply, "Hey cousin, have found
your family!"
Seems he had been researching family for a few years and he
knew many of my aunts , uncles, cousins and such! My father
Angus Gillis was the second eldest of 24 siblings.
It is interesting that I had gone from being the Titular
head of my small family of six to one of over 1,500!
The site is now called "The MacDonald Thorpe Family!"
There is an old Cape Breton saying:
"If mistakes were Haystacks, we'd all have a cow!"
Very appropro in my case.
Submitted: Wed May 5 12:18:22 1999
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