LUCKY LEAF by Tom Townsend [email protected]

I love reading everyone's stories of miraculous discoveries of their ancestry and have longed for something like that to happen to me. Well, in December 2000 it did.

Periodically for years, I have tried to find information on my great-grandmother's LEAF family. The only thing I had on them were some notes my grandfather took down in the 1920s from his brother-in-law. From there, they seemed to fall off the face of the earth -- until that week in December.

I live in Dayton, Ohio and work in a small town between Dayton and Cincinnati. My co-workers are split between those who live in Dayton and those who live in Cincinnati. This means that there are both cities' newspapers around the office. I rarely read either one, but for some reason I picked up the CINCINNATI ENQUIRER (not even the front page, but the "local" section). There was an article about a time capsule being found in a courthouse near Cincinnati. There was a small picture of a bearded man in the picture. I about fell off the seat when I saw the caption of the picture - "Isaac LEAF." In addition to the contents of the time capsule, the article was about this man who was brother to my great-great-grandfather. The last line of the article mentioned a descendant of Isaac still living in the area.

I contacted the paper, then the reporter. He gave me the phone number of the descendant. I looked up his address and wrote him a letter. The next day, I received a call from the man. As it turned out, he had just started looking into his family tree. We compared notes, discovered some discrepancies, made some connections and now are both better-informed about our LEAF ancestors.

What made me look at a "foreign" (to me) newspaper, in the "local" section? I don't know, but I feel that something or someone directed me to it