Catching long-lost family with the ’Net

Research tool, communication vehicle, guide to life: the Internet has the power to connect us to the information we need, quickly and cheaply. It also has the power to reunite families.

That’s the happy surprise that Justin Martin got when he conducted a Web search on his own name. The physician living in Saudi Arabia was surprised—“gobsmacked,”as he put it—to find an extensive history of a branch of his family. The author was Christopher Earls Brennen, Caltech’s vice president of student affairs.

“He managed to find a family history that I placed on the Web years ago,” explained Brennen, who grew up in the County Londonderry town of Magherafelt, in Northern Ireland.

Intrigued by his find, Martin sent a query e-mail to the site’s creator. With that, Brennen and Martin, cousins who had known each other for only a handful of days during their childhood, got to meet each other again as adults.

Since then, Brennen has contacted and had a reunion dinner with Martin’s sister Caroline. In an ironic twist, she has lived and worked in the Los Angeles area for decades and had even visited Caltech in the course of her job as an executive assistant at the Los Angeles Times. Through her, Brennen learned about a number of relatives who are living in distant parts of the world.

“Part of our cultural heritage is to travel the world and to emigrate,” Brennen said. Leave it to technology and serendipity to bring some lucky members of this far-flung family a little closer together.
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