I met our relative Jeanne today!

I had the great opportunity to meet Jeanne Gude Taysom on the phone today. Jeanne is indeed in Tempe, Arizona as I was theorizing on an earlier post I made here from some internet research I performed yesterday.  What a wonderful lady!  She is full of wonderful personality, spirit and loads of interesting stories about the Gude family. She and her Husband have lived in Arizona for about 50 years and have five children.  I can’t wait to learn more about her immediate and distant family and all the research she has performed. Our conversation jumped quickly from generation to generation with me struggling to keep it all straight as I tried to reconcile bits and pieces of stories from my family with endless records I’ve stared at on paper in libraries and more recently online, and it was amazing to hear someone talking about real people as she knew them, or from her accounts of first hand conversations with family members that are now departed.
She has been researching the family since 1951! Her depth of knowledge about our family goes so far beyond what we know in my immediate family as to be mind blowing to me.  Although Jeanne knew of my Grandfather Arthur and his two brothers, she had no knowledge that both Arthur and Buck had kids. Of course these kids would become what we refer to in our immediate family as the East Coast and West Coast Gude’s (even though we’re all from the East Coast). Although, I must follow up with Jeanne and see if she remembers talking with my Grandfather Arthur as my Aunt Pat recalls that a Twin was the one who contacted him a long time ago and verified that they were related. This is intertwined with Pat remembering that this Twin was in Colorado and I don’t think Jeanne lived there from our chat today so we have lots of little pieces of information to put together.  Pat is sure that Arthur spoke of the Twins as well from his first hand knowledge, which would make sense since Jeanne’s dad would have been Arthur’s Uncle.

I had a fun conversation with Pat today and she was equally excited to learn about Jeanne and I know Dad will see my e-mail to him about this in Australia when he awakes soon.

One reason that she thought I might be Robert Gude’s son is that she saw in my O.J. post that I had lived in Australia. The Blizzard’s brother Oscar has a son Robert, who, if I have my facts straight, moved to Australia! So, there may still be a closely realted Gude in Australia. What a small world. This also makes me think of the lady who reached out to us from England that had been given up for adoption. Her dad was a Gude and she had traced him to Australia. I recall that she reached my mum in the end and that we passed information around the family trying to help but couldn’t. Too bad she didn’t meet Jeanne, she could have helped her! I was such an idiot I kept interrupting Jeanne so I never got a chance to learn more about Robert’s travels to Australia and so that will be high on the list for the next conversation.