I have an older brother who died a couple days after birth. As far as I knew up to age 35ish I was #1. My parents died never speaking of him. A relative accidentally spilled the beans. Oops. I still don’t know his name or how to find it.
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This is really sad for you! l wonder if there’s some way to hunt via birth certificates.
I find that really sad. My friend’s family cherished the memory of the first son even though he was only with them for a few months. Too bad your parents couldn’t talk about him with you and your other brother.
That generation was not into sharing. At. All. It wasn’t until we were in our 30s or maybe slightly later that our mom told us she’d had her tubes tied after our brother was born (her doctor said if you had another pregnancy it will kill you). But being Catholic it was something she felt guilty about and somewhat ashamed after all those years. And she said Dr. Bell was Catholic, too, but he had no issue with doing what he did to potentially save a life. Good doctor.
It might be sad - but there’s also a difference between a child who lives a few months and one who lives a few days or even a few minutes. My kids know I had a child who died at or shortly after birth but what would I have talked to them about ? How terrified I was on the way to the hospital ( it was a very premature birth)? There weren’t any good memories.
True that.
My son’s ex was named Rachael. We called one of the grandmothers Baba. We have two cats who are foster failures (sad stories in both cases, but i digress). I agreed to foster each before learning their names. Yes, the first is Rachel, and the second is Baba. We took in the first while my son was still married to Rachael, although they had started using a different name when they came out as non-binary.
Technically my son is named after the baby we didn’t adopt. We had selected that name for the child and it didn’t go the way we planned. And I liked the name. And I do think of that baby (I never met) sometimes when I hear my son’s name. It was a very painful experience. But most of the time I just think of my son. I can’t imagine him being called anything else.
On my dad’s side, the cousin we thought for a long time as the eldest wasn’t actually the eldest. I found out when I was in my teens that my aunt and uncle had had a son before him, who’d died in infancy. Nobody talked about Jeffery until my dad casually mentioned while driving through a community not far from where we lived, “You guys have a cousin buried here.” I was probably 13/14, and Jeffrey would have been about 18 or so.
NONE of the adults (my parents, my aunt and uncle, nor my grandparents) ever mentioned Jeffrey up to that point, and my parents didn’t really want to talk about him even after my dad dropped the bombshell.
Fast forward three decades, and my wife decided to do some sleuthing. She’s a semi-professional genealogist, and found records about Jeffrey. She found his birth and death records, including where he’s buried - and not where my dad thought, either. Both aunt and uncle are gone, as is my dad. I don’t know if my eldest surviving cousin - Jeffrey’s brother - knows about his own older brother or not. I’ll be seeing him soon, and I don’t know if I’ll ask.
My advice is don’t. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. Assuming he doesn’t know, he might be totally OK with finding out now from you, and he might not.
You know his personality and I don’t. But some people are weirded out by things you might not otherwise expect. And this topic hits some classic hot buttons shared by lots of people.
If there was some way in conversation to naturally bring up the correct cemetery, or the one your Dad mistakenly cited, with no connection to Jeffery, that might be a way to launch a trial balloon. If he knows, he might take the bait and fill you in. If he doesn’t take the bait you still don’t know whether he doesn’t know, or does know but doesn’t want to talk about it. Which non-want might be due to anything from “don’t much care” to “major league depressed about it still”.
Deep and cold water there.
My aunt, my grandparent’s first child, was a stillborn due the the doctor messing up during the birth. My grandmother never mentioned it and my grandfather talked about it to me exactly once.
Yeah, I definitely get it. The terrain is laden with booby traps. The larger context is that he and I are the last of a group of four of us cousins who practically grew up together, only 3½ years separating the four of us. Our grandparents, his parents, and my dad are gone. Our joint favorite aunt has lived abroad for decades and is so far into her dementia that she doesn’t know us, so when he and I talk, we do a lot of reminiscing about days gone by, how we miss our respective brothers and our grandparents, and the stupid shit we used to do. He, too, has gotten into genealogy, so it might be possible to work Jeffery into a conversation.
He’s been surprised at some of his own genealogical finds recently, too. His father was of proud Norwegian stock, born and raised in Minnesota where there’s a lot of that side of the family still living, and all damn proud Norwegians. My cousin has done a couple of DNA tests, though, and both of them show 0% Norwegian DNA. Zero. For 60+ years, he thought it was half Norwegian, but both tests turned up some other Nordic ancestry. His Minnesota relatives refuse to believe it. Their name, incidentally, is likely German (Bavarian, possibly), and definitely not Norwegian.
It’s possible he knows about Jeffery, and if he doesn’t, he may be receptive to the news. I’ll have to tread lightly.
Have you looked at findagrave.com to see if your aunt, uncle, and eldest cousin are listed and if their relationships are shown? Just a thought that if he did any poking around on info on the parents that might possibly show up.
Side note: If your cousin’s ancestry is Swedish, he might be related to my wife, as DNA and subsequent sleuthing showed that her grandfather was a Swedish immigrant.
My wife has gone way beyond findagrave. She knows when Jeffrey was born, when he died, and where he’s buried. She’s quite the dogged researcher. I don’t know if my cousin knows any of this, because I don’t know how much research he’s actually done, other than to spit in a couple of vials. One thing we have learned from my wife’s research is that some families want the family secrets to stay secret, while others think they’re data points that make the family history interesting. The problem is that often you don’t know where things fall on that spectrum until it’s too late!
We have a fairly long thread by a Doper whose wife HAD to know. Which IIRC stirred up rather a big hornets’ nest in the extended family by the end of her quest.
“Pedigree failure” is rather more common than people suppose.
@ricepad’s cousin’s case isn’t that. But surprisesurk everywhere.
If I’d had a child die a couple of days after birth, i might have told my kids, but i might not have. And if i did, i wouldn’t really be telling them about their sibling, I’d be telling them about myself, about my hopes and fears and pain. What is there to say about a two day old child? He weighed 5 pounds? He had wrinkled skin? That’s basically a delayed still-birth. Demographers track perinatal mortality, which combines late still deaths with early neonatal deaths.
She still is everywhere, & she’s a shop-a-haulic, too! Wherever I travel, I enter her phone # & get the club discount price. I’m tellin’ ya, Jenny, Jenny, she’s the girl for me.
My mother was into sharing, unfortunately, even though she was “that” generation (b. 1940). I think it’s a Jewish thing, or maybe an E. Europe thing. My mother shared like it was her job, and she was paid on commission. OMG. What I would have done for her to shut up for a day.
I knew way too much, way too young about how adult minds worked.
My mom was eastern European, too, but not Jewish. She was born in the US, but both her parents were immigrants.
Her entire family (7 kids) were very close-mouthed about anything the teeny tiniest bit scandalous.
Being “respectable” was super huge.
My mother didn’t gossip about scandal, she just over-shared about TMI-type things. Long before I thought to ask, I was told where babies came from AND how they got there, using illustrations from a book meant for older children. I was horrified.
I always knew when my mother was due for her period, because she marked it on the calendar in the kitchen, that was marked with all our birthdays, extended family birthdays, everyone’s appointments, including the pets, and what they were for, paydays, and anything else slightly significant.
I was allowed to read anything I wanted and watch anything I wanted, and I’m glad there was no censorship, but while questions were always answered, sometimes I didn’t even have the frame of reference to formulate questions.
That went double for a lot of things said to me. I really didn’t want to know about my mother’s problems, her sexist pig of a department chair, what he said to women, and how she told him off, or about the guy who exposed himself to her in the library parking lot, or her mother’s fibroid tumors, and how she needed a hysterectomy. All before I was 10.
All supposedly things I needed to know about if I was going to live in the world, but she spoke to me like I was another adult, not a child.