Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your 2023 Christmas Genea-gifts

At first I was thinking that I had not received any genea-gifts for Christmas and therefore was not going to comment on today's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post from Randy Seaver, but then I reconsidered.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  Was Genea-Santa good to you?  What genealogy gifts did you receive for Christmas this year?

2.  Tell us about them in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook Status  post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

So I had only one item in my 2023 Dear Genea-Santa letter:  I am still trying to find Raymond Lawrence Sellers, the son my aunt gave up for adoption in 1945 in New Jersey (a very unfriendly state to deal with for adoption records after 1940).  And I might have made progress.  Maybe.

After I posted my Genea-Santa letter, I was contacted by someone who thinks s/he (nope, no reveal here) was in contact with Raymond.  The person I was told about VERY STRONGLY resembles (I saw a photo; could almost be a twin) a known person in my family.  The known person in the family would be a sibling to the person being hypothesized as Raymond.  And the person being hypothesized as Raymond knew he was adopted.

But the hypothetical Raymond is older than Raymond should be.  So does that mean that my aunt had her facts mixed up?  After so many years of hiding information and outright lying on her part, absolutely possible.  Or could this almost-twin be related to the known person in the family in another way that would explain the VERY STRONG resemblance?  Also possible.

So Genea-Santa didn't give me a straightforward gift for this but instead a tantalizing teaser that still needs to be resolved.  But it's certainly the most progress I have made on this in the past six years.

And I did get another gift from Genea-Santa.  In Linda Stufflebean's updated "December Meme" from two weeks ago, one of the questions was where you wanted to be dropped off if you could hitch a ride on Santa's sleigh.  I chose Lebanon, where my two oldest grandchildren live.  It turned out I didn't have to go down to Lebanon; the sleigh apparently dropped them off for a visit in Vancouver!  And that was a wonderful present indeed.