A SCRAP OF PAPER

Catharine is a family name, frequently spelled CathErine, but always with a C. I’m quite proud of that as my middle name is Catharine, after my great grandmother Catharine Owens. Someone at the hospital corrected my mother’s spelling, so I am legally, CathErine. I don’t think I even knew Catharine’s last name for most of my life, but my mother did have it written down in the main genealogy papers that she gave me sometime before her death. She had her birth date written down as well and she came from Bala, Wales. Not too helpful, with names as common as Owens, Thomas, and Catharine. There was a Robert Owens that I had heard my mom talking about in Nepesta, CO but I never made the connection. To make a long story short I didn’t have any hope of ever tracking down anything about that part of the family.


In my life, I had gone with a guy back in High School, who went into the Marines. He came home on leave after his basic training, and we got engaged. It only lasted a couple of weeks after his leave ended, I was all of 16 at the time! I never heard from him after that, and I lived my life. A year or so after my mom died, though he contacted me on face book, and we are together again.

While I was going through some of the papers I had brought home from my mother’s I found a scrap of paper from back in my high school days. I had been doodling and writing his name while I was talking on the phone. Funny to have found that so soon after we had gotten back together, kind of cute, but just a scrap of paper, didn’t need to keep it, toss it in the garbage.

WAIT!!! STOP!!! HOLD ON!!! What’s written on the back of that doodling scrap of paper? A list of names, all with the last name of OWENS!!! AND another column titled married name, giving the spouses name.

It’s amazing what I was able to do with that one little piece of paper that I almost threw in the trash. I would never have been able to do anything without it. I did recently find a really old book that had a bio of Robert Owens in it and it did list some of his brothers and sisters, but not all of them and not their spouses, and as I say I didn’t even realize that Robert Owens was related to my great grandmother.

Having all the children’s names, I was able to find out the ship that they came to the US in, and find them in the census for Licking, Ohio. Once I knew their parents names, I was even able to find them in a census for Wales. And slowly, with the names of the brothers and sisters, I am finding out the descendants of my great great grandparents, and maybe someday, I will actually be able to contact a distant cousin from that family.