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Getting an unnerving phone call from someone in my past

By Chuck Hunt - Editor | Sep 24, 2023

I got a rather unnerving phone call one day last week. And no, it was not from some irate Register reader.

The call came in on our new phone system here at the Faribault County Register office. You see, we have become modernized with our phones. We no longer have that usual office phone sitting on our desks – because our phone is now on our computer. Have you ever done a Zoom meeting on your computer? Our phone system is through Zoom.

I can also have my office Zoom phone on my cellphone, so I can answer it wherever I am.

I am still trying to figure it all out, however. It is a bit of a slow go for an old guy like me.

But I digress.

The other day I got an incoming phone call on my computer and my cellphone at the same time on the Register office number. Like on a cellphone, the caller’s name and their phone number come up on my Zoom system letting me know who is calling me.

The caller was Timothy Hunt.

Many of you probably don’t know that I once had a brother named Timothy Hunt, who was 12 years younger than I, and who passed away from cancer about 18 years ago.

As you can imagine, it kind of shook me a bit that my dead brother’s name came up on my phone and I wondered if someone had found a way to prank me on this new phone system.

I was pretty sure it was not my brother Tim, unless Zoom had found a way to have their phone system work in heaven.

It turns out that it was a different person named Timothy Hunt, but it also turns out he is a relative of mine.

We share the same great-grandfather, Judge Byrd Hunt from Middletown in Lake County, California.

I share this with you because of the way he found me and connected with me and why he was calling me on the Register office number. No, it was not a DNA test on Ancestry.com where he learned we might be related. It was actually through the pages of the Faribault County Register.

It seems this new Tim Hunt (new to me, anyway) has been intrigued by his great-grandfather named Byrd Hunt and has done some research on him. A Google search of Byrd Hunt led him to an Editor’s Notebook column I wrote a while back about my great-grandfather Byrd, who was a circuit justice of the peace and was known as Judge Byrd Hunt.

Tim Hunt is the same age as I am, and is a retired college professor in Illinois. We are now sharing our research on the Hunt family with each other, which is great for me, since I never knew much Hunt family history.

I have always been a bit envious of folks who live where their grandfather and grandmother did, maybe even where their great-grandparents did. Sometimes even in the same house or on the same farm. They know a lot about their family history.

Not so much for my brothers and myself, who grew up hardly ever seeing or visiting our grandparents, or hearing family history stories from them.

And there wasn’t any Zoom visiting, of course, back then. We barely ever spoke to them on the phone.

So, it is a bit interesting to learn about these relatives and ancestors of mine, and get a glimpse of what they were like, and what their lives were like back then in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s. It was rough in many ways, and they did not have much for possessions or money. But I think they were hardworking and adventurous and still had time for fun once in a while.

My great-grandfather Byrd was a freight hauler with horses and wagons, but he also was a world class fiddler and entertained at town events and county fairs and even performed once on the radio station in San Francisco.

I have a trophy he won for fiddling, and my new-found relative Tim has Byrd’s actual fiddle. Believe it or not, it was held together with twine.

I think my great-grandfather was a real character. And I think I would have liked him a lot. Unfortunately, he died a couple of years before I was born.

I will continue to do some research on him, of course, and now I have someone else to share that research with. I will try not to be startled when I see my dead brother’s name pop up on my incoming phone calls in the future.

Maybe we can even have a Zoom visit some time, if I ever get this new Zoom phone system figured out.

So, if you are lucky enough to have known your grandparents well, and maybe even great-grandparents, and you also know your family history in great detail, consider yourself fortunate.

And for those who don’t, maybe you will someday, and get a similar mysterious phone call like I did.