Beyond satisfying…

You know that warm feeling you get when you do something nice for somebody else, and nobody knows you did it? Thats what I’m feeling right now. Tonight I helped a group of dedicated genealogists located a “next of kin” for an unclaimed person that was given to them by a coroner’s office of a major US city. Not only did I help them, I found the decedent’s brother, who had an online posting at a social networking site that said that he has been looking for his long lost brother for over 20 years, and located what appears to be a current address for him. The rules of the game however are that only the coroner’s office makes the contact.

So its a bittersweet victory. Soon the coroner will be contacting the living sibling with the sad news that his brother passed away. The good news is that he will no longer be an unclaimed body in the morgue. And I get to walk around knowing that I’ve done a good deed. And put my genealogical research skills to a very, very good use.