This is a joyful, unbelievable genealogy success story having to do with old family stories and 'new fangled' electronics.

I began the research of my Bush family in early 1990. I had tracked the family back to my gggrandfather, George W. Bush (no relation to THE George) but could get no further. I was lucky to find a cousin and fellow researcher -- Julie Carr -- in Michigan who was an enormous help but together, we had only clues and suspicions about the parents of George. We were desperate and I turned to old family stories for clues.

One of them was about old "cousin R.T." My father often told the story. It seems cousin R.T. was a slacker. He came from a family of farmers, but R.T. couldn't stand the hard work on the farm; he didn't have any perseverance or "stick-to-it-ivness", Dad said.

So when R.T. was old enough, he left his father's farm, did this and that, even joined the circus, and went into a couple of hair-brained business deals. Finally, the story went, he ended up in New York City, of all places, and by some fluke of luck, built the Bush Terminals.

The way they told the story in our family, however, was not that he succeeded, but that he just couldn't work hard at anything. (This story was used whenever a lesson about perseverance was needed in our family.)

I never believed this story. I thought it was just another of my father's famous tales. He told unbelievable stories about his high school football team and also claimed to be related to Anheuser-Busch beer. My father and his sister were both dead by 1990 but I had been in contact with one of my father's cousins. I wrote to him and asked him if he had ever heard the story of Cousin RT.

I was amazed to get his letter which corroborated the story almost exactly the way my dad used to tell it. This cousin also gave me cousin R.T.'s name, Rufus T. Bush. With that, I wrote to the New York Genealogical Society and asked if a Rufus T. Bush had been associated with the old Bush Terminals in Brooklyn.

To my great surprise and happiness, they wrote back that yes, Rufus T. Bush had indeed built the terminals, and that his biography had been published. They gave me the citations and also referred me to the N.Y. Times index for other references to this family.

Well, I found Rufus and his biography, and much more. His father was the same Julie and I suspected was the father of our George. He had moved to Michigan from the same New York county (Tompkins) where George was born. Rufus was said to be the youngest of a large family, and that his family had moved to Michigan in the mid-1800s to live near an older brother! Julie and I were on the right track!

That is the old family part of my story. The high tech part came next.

At that time, in 1990, my husband and I were subscribers to the Prodigy Network. This was before the days of the "internet" when each service was more or less its own entity. My husband posted a message on Prodigy . . ."looking for parents of George Bush b. 1822 Tompkins County, N.Y. etc. etc."

It was late one Saturday afternoon when Glenn, my husband, turned from the computer and motioned for me to come take a look. I couldn't believe our luck! There was a response to our query.

The message gave me the parents of George, confirming that George was indeed Rufus' oldest brother and that fact was based on a genealogy completed and published for Rufus' son Irving. The greatest thrill was that this message came from a Bush cousin who traced his family back to George as well.

After I stopped jumping around the room and screaming for joy, we pondered what luck, what serendipity, that we were on Prodigy posting our message, when my Bush cousin was also on Prodigy, also doing genealogy and checking the messages.

Thanks to this Bush cousin, with whom I now regularly correspond, I have my Bush (originally Ter Bush/Busch/Bos) back to the 15th century in Holland. And I'm a firm believer in old family stories and genealogy computer networks!