Pictured above from left to right: Katja, Matthew and Ulla.
Sorry, this is not a birth announcement. No new baby Wynekens here. …
One advantage of having a website with one’s genealogy information is that every once in a while someone writes you because he or she has discovered a family connection with the help of your site. That is what happened last week.
A woman named Ulla wrote telling me that her family had told her very little about her family’s background so she had just decided to see if she could find anything out with the help of the Internet. And bingo, my website popped up right away.
Side note: It’s not alway easy having a “weird” name like Wyneken. I’m sure I’m not alone in often having to say things like, “It’s spelled with a ‘y’. No ‘c’ in front of the ‘k’, thank you”. Or “You are free to pronounce it that way if you like, but I pronounce it …”. The upside of the situation, though, is we’re easy to find in the Internet.
We easily figured out where she fit in the family tree. I had the names of her father, aunt and uncles in my database. Just the names, no other information. She told me that she lives in nearby Basel, Switzerland and that before that she had even lived in Freiburg for four years. Because of our geographic proximity I suggested that we get together sometime.
It so happened that Katja and I had planned our next semi-regular monthly lunchtime meeting for the next Friday so I suggested to Ulla that she come up and join us. And she did. As luck would have it, the two of them are actually very closely related. Ulla’s grandmother, Emma Wyneken, and Katja’s grandmother, Adolfine Wyneken, were first cousins.
We had a lovely lunch together and talked about this and that. Ulla brought photographs and gave me a sheet of paper with new names and dates for my database.
We are hoping to set up regular get-togethers, and I’m going to see if other Wyneken relatives who live in the area might be interested in joining us.
Wyneken Family History 