Researching family trees and family histories is a very special type of work. It takes lots of patience, both with the deceased ones and with the living.

People who want their family trees to be researched come from all around the world and it’s no wonder every one of them is different. But as special as family Sadar was, none were before them.

They contacted me with a simple task – to find their ancestral families and where their grandparents came from. Research was not hard, vital books were well kept and all was fine up until they decided to come to meet their living relatives about a year after I did their initial research.

They asked me to contact living relatives and ask them if they could come by and meet them, to see where their grandparents came from.

Suspicious family

And so I did – but their cousin was a real “doubtful Thomas”. When I introduced myself and told her I was hired to find her and the rest of her family the first thing she asked was “Are you serious”? “You must be joking, right?”. Eventually she agreed on us meeting her in a few days, but I could sense she was still suspicious. Little did I know of how big the suspicion was.

So I met with Sadars on a beautiful morning and when we sat down for a while before leaving to go to Krka, their ancestor’s birth place, they expressed their doubt in my research and wondered where the information came from, if this was the correct data and if there was absolutely no doubt that this family is theirs. I explained the processes of research, after which they were convinced enough to get in my car and off we went.

The village of Krška vas was astounding – simple farm houses standing by the river stream, flowers all so perfect in their blossom and a cousin who, after she saw us said “Oh my I didn’t believe you were real, so I actually didn’t prepare anything for you!”

Hundreds of pictures

She didn’t believe we were real, she thought I was a survey girl who just wanted to get into her house under the pretense of living relatives in America!

She laughed aloud when they pulled their huge paper with family tree out and when she saw names of her ancestors she easily recognized.

Her mother came by a little later and was surprised even more. She and her son mocked the cousin when she first told them that a genealogist called. They asked her if she was crazy enough to believe it!

But after all the crying and the tears they pulled out their family pictures and my clients got their proof. There were, among hundreds of pictures they had two pictures with family from America, with my clients grandfather and an old house he lived in. There was the proof that they were more than willing to believe in, there was proof that bonded them together again, this time forever.

I always say that cases like this are why I do this work. Connecting living relatives who don’t know of each other, but still share such a big part of their past without which they cannot progress. Sadars had a great time with their newly found family members, but discovered one more thing during their visit – they all have those special, funny noses and Mr. Sadar said jokingly, although I believe it to be the truth, “if there was nothing else to prove we were related, I would most definitely believe it just by looking at our noses”.