Banners in my Blood

Now, let me flip this around a little. A Facebook post about a historic home in our community led someone to me, because of a family name. That question led to digging out a 12 year old printout of some genealogy stuff that a cousin had done. I used Ancestry.com to lay out the connections she had, and then switched over to mundia.com, which is related and free.

I followed little leaves, plugged in things I knew, and googled the heck out of my maiden name. And then? I found this.

This is a photo of a couple of guys who played basketball at Indiana. They were part of the team in 1939-1940.

That season just happens to be the year Indiana won their first NCAA championship. These guys were part of banner number 1.

They are my grandfather’s cousins.

I have banner blood.

So, I found this late one night, and tweeted about it, and a guy who works for the university in the athletic department tweeted back at me -

@taxmegan They are your cousins? We just discovered that Bill, who was killed at Normandy, was on that team. So cool.

— jfgray (@jfgray) October 19, 2012

Holy moly, wait, what!? So, we have this whole conversation, and the guy on the right played for 3 seasons, then went to war and was killed in 1944. Apparently, someone else had recently contacted the university, and there was some information that had been uncovered that had been lost for the last, oh, 60 or 70 years, and now they had it?

Next – my visit with @jfgray and what we uncovered.