Seriously, just a sign in the middle of a swamp

Dead relatives are far less likely to embarrass you in public. This is my conclusion after two months of research into my family history. First of all, the fact that I am acknowledging any of my family is something that several of my relations will not easily believe. I haven't exactly been subtle in avoiding the yearly gatherings, and I'm quite sure I have several new cousins or in-laws that have so far passed under the radar completely. It was a whim, to begin with, a website with a link to ancestry.com where I quickly found census records and linked family trees, all neatly categorized. That was where it hooked me. I am a nerd of epic proportions, and the idea that for the first time ever my family could be neatly written out and categorized, their complete insanity erased for the calm few lines that remained, well it made me happier than it should have.
I paid the monthy fee and soon I was making remarkable progress. I found an uncle of my mother's, a certain Howard Broussard, that she had never before heard of. An enterprising and helpful group of people have transcribed the tombstones for the Vermilion parish cemeteries, and I was able to find his grave, in the Cossinade cemetery. Despite 23 years of living in and around Vermilion parish, I had never heard of Cossinade, although my mom was fairly sure it "used to be somewhere past Kaplan." Armed with her cell phone camera and an umbrella against the sudden rain, we trekked out to this mythical forgotten site. Many of the roads off of Hwy 14 were flooded over by this point, but we had gone to far to turn back, and then there it was ahead of us: Cossinade, 3 miles.
All that remains of the town of Cossinade, it turns out, is that sign, and the small cemetery. Even the church was moved to Kaplan a few years after it was built. But there was Howard Broussard, who had been 25 when he died. He was buried in a plot along with an Orina Vincent, same date of death. No further information has been unearthed so far, but even if it turns out to be nothing more eventful than a buggy accident, I think it's nice, in a way, to know what happened to these people. Certainly the Broussard family will never be of any major interest to historians, but certainly Howard deserves some acknowledgement of his life. Even if that record is only this.
The next step is to travel to Memphis (voluntarily!? unheard of) and talk to my grandmother. Don't know if I'm quite ready to make the switch to living relatives, but she's the only one still alive, and I'll hate myself for not doing it. We can only pray the rest of them won't descend on me en masse and ruin my resolve, I still haven't forgiven them for the way they behaved the last time we went out to eat together.