The Power of Google
Once upon a time, way back in 8th grade, my civics teacher gave us a project. It was to go on the Vietnam Memorial's website, find a name, and write a report about them. We could find information about that particular person and write up a non-fictional report, or we could totally make up a story about them. I decided to search for someone with the same family name as me. However, since "White" is very common, I went with my mom's maiden name, Maccubbin. There were no Maccubbin's on the wall. I remembered that my grandma's maiden name was Klinger. So I searched that name. 
There was one Klinger on the wall. Henry Chester Klinger. When I googled him for information on family or anything, I couldn't really find enough to write a true report on him, plus I love making up stories. So I went the second route...writing a made up story about my chosen Hero. It was a love story. And I so wish I could find the story, because it was a good one! But being that it was so long ago, and my family moved since then, so I have no idea what happened to it. Unfortunately, the ending was a very sad one. Just as I'm sure the real life ending of his story was devastating for his family.
Fast forward about five years, Kevin and I went to DC for Spring Break. My grandma lives near there, so we stayed with her, and rode the metro in to the city to site see every day! It was awesome, but cold! One of the days we went in to DC, we walked by the Vietnam Memorial Wall. I had gotten a rubbing of Henry Klinger's name in 8th grade when we had come up on a class trip, and I wanted to find his name again! So we looked him up in the books, and found his name again. Kevin got a picture of me rubbing his name.
Back then, I had a blog on blogspot.com. And wrote a post about the day and how I did the rubbing.
Fast forward another 3 years, and we come to a few months ago. I got a message from Henry's sister!!! She had been searching her brother on google and came across my blog post and wanted to contact me to tell me about him and her family. It was amazing. I never expected to ever speak to his family. It was a true honor to be able to speak to his sister. I had always had him in my heart since I came across his name nearly 10 years ago!
TODAY, I googled myself. I was bored, don't say you've never done it! I had to do my entire name since Taylor White just gets me Elizabeth Taylor White Diamond results. The first result is a Genealogical Record of the family of Eaves and Klinger. It was my family! My whole direct family is in it along with the Klinger side of my mom's mom's family. Awesome discovery! Not only that, I found out that my great-great-great grandfather's name is Henry Klinger! (as well as his dad) Unfortunately I could not find Henry Chester Klinger in the 75,000 ancestors and relatives on the website [yikes!], so I still don't know if we're related, but I still told Henry's sister about it. It was just really neat.
So that is my story about the power of google!
~Taylor~
Comments (2)
your story totally made my day :)
Posted by sfarris | November 5, 2009 11:36 PM
And you made my day by commenting on my blog! :) I never get comments! haha
Posted by Taylor | November 8, 2009 11:37 PM