I get great joy out of uniting families in my genealogical research.  The trail of research is sometimes unbelievable in the way that things come together.  I’m going to give you a brief run down of recent research I did that connected two half-sisters.  They didn’t even  know the other one existed before this.  One lives in northern Nevada and the other lives in Western Australia – and how they’re sisters and how I found them goes like this:

I was hired by a women here in Nevada to help her find her family.  She had never known her father and wanted to find out any information about him.  In searching the internet, I stumbled upon a posting on an ancestry message board from 2001.  It asked if anyone had any information about an Orville Bane.  This was the name of my client’s father, so I wrote back to the email address at this post.  I wasn’t sure if the  email was still valid – as it had been 13 years since the post.  I was pleasantly surprised when Sandra Smith from Queensland, Australia answered my email right way.  All those long years ago, she had been trying to help another lady whose father was Orville Bane.  We exchanged information about our clients back and forth, as well as what we knew of their possible common father.  In comparing the one and only photo we have of Orville Bane, it is clear they are related.  From everything we now know, we are convinced that they are half-sisters.  We are looking for more records to show actual proof and may even end up using DNA to confirm.  In the meantime, both of these women are very happy to have found each other.

It turns out the woman I originally contacted in Australia, Sandra Smith, has an amazing story of her own. She spent years searching for information about her birth-father, an American soldier stationed in Australia during World War II.  Through an incredible string of events, she finally found what happened to him.  The whole story of this amazing search and its conclusion can be found here.  http://projecthomecoming.org/stories_JosephThompson.html  It is an incredible tale, so check it out.

Sandra dedicates herself to helping others and uniting families and she is truly an incredible and caring individual.  I am honored to call her my friend.

Lisa Hamilton

Sandra’s father Joseph Thompson

Joseph Thompson going to his final resting place