Border What Border?

One thing that you begin to notice as you research you ancestors is that they seem to view the border as not there at all. Searching the border crossings at Ancestry.com is a good way to track some of these elusive people. Not only that, if you look at the document closely it may also give you a bit of an insight as to what they looked like (I found that my maternal grandfather whom I never knew as he died in 1935 was 5’8” with blue eyes and brown hair). Since I have never been able to find photos of him I can color in an image of him.
Cousins visited cousins, nephews uncles, uncles nephews. Some of the family from Canada immigrated to the U.S. on a permanent basis, some lived (mostly in Detroit) for a time and then returned to Canada. Equally, Hillmans from Michigan did the same this way.
In 1930 one of the family began the first Hillman picnic of descendants of George Hillman and Susannah Browne at Pt. Glascow, Elgin County and it has been an annual event since that time. One gets the feeling that this family in the nineteenth century was an extended family very much unlike the nuclear families of today.