An Early Crossing of Paths Between The Swan and Sechler Families

Our mother recalls that her first planned meeting with the Sandford family at the Ontario homestead had to be postponed because of the death of our father’s grandmother. Our great grandmother Mabel Tuttle Swan died in October 1951 at age 85.

Had our mother met Mattie Swan, there is a small possibility that they could have figured out the connection with a story that Mattie might have read 44 years earlier in the San Bernardino County Sun. News of the death of our great grandfather George Sechler in Manhattan, and subsequent events, appeared nationwide.

Both our parents grew up in households that included their maternal grandmothers following the tragic deaths of their husbands. This common experience could easily have come up in introductory conversations between the two families. Whether or not Mattie would remember a news story from 44 years ago, it is an example of family paths crossing long before the connecting of two branches of the family tree.

There are several examples of this kind of coincidental path-crossing in our family history, for example, the Calderwood and Swan families both coming from the same area in Vermont a century before the 1921 marriage of our grandparents in California. I’ll point out some other examples in future posts.