I don’t dwell on my brother much anymore, but this week has reminded me of him a lot. Co-workers were talking about some guy with a double life who disappeared from one of his families, and the next day an aunt that found me on Facebook asked if I’ve heard anything about my brother lately. She isn’t comfortable asking my mom, you see.
From what I understand, he left the state (NC) to help someone move, and didn’t come back. He was working for one of our aunts, and she got a call from a company (in WA) asking about a job reference for him a few months later. That’s all anyone has heard. He disappeared about 4 years ago. He left all of his things at our grandpa’s house (where he was living) and just… didn’t come back. We don’t talk about him much, since there’s not much to say anymore, and it tends to bring things down a lot. Conversations tend to be “have you heard anything?” “no.” We assume it was deliberate since he was looking for a job on the other side of the country, but we don’t know why. He didn’t indicate that there was such a huge problem and he really seemed to be getting his life straightened out.
We weren’t close at all before he moved to NC, and I try not to think about him too much, but despite the problems we had I just hope he’s okay. Before he left I kept thinking it’d be nice if we could actually act like family for once since we were both adults and getting past our personal issues. Now I’m pretty sure I’ll never get the chance to really have a big brother.
Has this happened to anyone else? I’m curious how common this is.
We had these conversations at my parents’ 50th anniversary party concerning my pain in the ass brother. We speculated that he might have finally mouthed off to the wrong person and ended up hospitalized, or worse. He finally resurfaced in Northern California.
Probably my great-grandpa, who supposedly left a failing potato farm and multiple children in Slovenia <I don’t know which part, since I never knew him or my grandfather> to skip to America and start over. All I know is that the words ‘Serbo-Croatian’ would tick my grandmother’s mother off to the point my dad would finally tell me 'There’s no such thing; they’re <insert whichever one we are, and not the other> . And my grandmother had the same reaction regarding the difference between East Germany and Austria. But I don’t speak German, and was too young to get it anyway.
But yah, fleeing the country seems to run in the blood, as I’m 3rd generation on mom’s side, too.
Me, I just like to wander around. I don’t do it on purpose, though my family thinks I do. :dubious:
I like to wander, too, but I at least keep in touch The interesting (and really shitty) thing is he lived with us in WA before moving to NC. So he came back here where we are but still hasn’t gotten in touch. It’s remotely possible that he’s tried to, but we’ve all moved more than once since then, so maybe he can’t. That’s probably wishful thinking, though.
Yeah, I had a cousin who dropped off the face of the earth for a number of years. He was a “problem child” long before he took off–high school dropout, drugs, drinking, joined the Navy and seemed to shape up for awhile, but then went AWOL and was dishonorably discharged. I don’t remember all the details, but on the last day he broke into my grandparents house and stole some money and jewelry, stole his Mom’s car (later turned up one state over) and disappeared.
None of us heard from him for about ten years. During that time one of our other cousins died at the age of fifteen, and he (missing cousin) didn’t know until years after the fact because none of us knew how to contact him. He eventually turned up with a wife and four kids (two step, two his own). He’d been all over, homeless at one point, still kinda screwed up.
These days most of the family maintains basic contact through Facebook, but he’s still not really part of our lives. It’s sad, really, but those are the choices he’s made. If he approached us and said, “I’m sorry for the past, and I’d like for us to be in each other’s lives again,” almost all of us would be open to it. But he hasn’t made the gesture.
My younger brother quit the Navy and disappeared, which itself would had been a nice thing but he managed to take my sick mother’s savings with him.
Nice fellow, no? Specially since putting him through the military and naval academy was in big part the reason why my mother had a complete meltdown and ended up in a nursing home.
Being half a world away from where he may had gone to it was hard for me to investigate his whereabouts, but my older brother finally found him after a year or a year and a half but I’m not sure know if he was successful in contacting him.
I sometimes wish I could disappear. I have this fantasy of just saying “screw it” to everything and walking off into the sunset alone and then going to some mountain and turning feral. How nice it would be just turn my back on modern civilization. Alas, I have a family I’m responsible for and I can’t turn my back on anything.
My mother’s uncle disappeared, long ago. This guy had been an officer in the US Navy, and was supposedly married to one of the Wanamaker family (Chicago)-but everybody lost contact with hime in the 1920’s. I was always curious about the man, because my grandmother always kept a picture of the guy on a table in her livingroo.
Years ago,my father contacted US navy personnel dept., and tried tofind what hapened-they replied that his last known address was a veteran’s home in Chicago (1929). So nobody ever knew what happened to the man.
I disappeared around the age of 19 and managed to stay quite disappeared for about five years or so. My family is sort of riddled with issues, and at one point, I got fed up and jumped ship. I felt like I didn’t really gain anything by being a part of it, and much of my life was made easier by being alone. This made for some tense years, occasionally feeling like a hunted fugitive.
My mother eventually found me (I’d stopped seriously hiding at this point and was just living). She’d become a different person and so had I, and we managed to give it another shot. My father’s side of the family and I are just starting to get in touch again. Oddly enough, I found out from them that my father is now the one who ran away.
I have a sister that’s probably in California. Somewhere. I really don’t know, actually. No one in my family knows. I haven’t seen her in probably 10 years. She calls every so often though, so she hasn’t COMPLETELY disappeared but her number’s different every time.
Last time I talked to her she had quit doing drugs and had been out of jail for awhile. She’s married to some really old dude and has a few kids with some baby-daddies, BUT is also going to school for nursing.
Well, there was a great great great aunt who ran off from her husband to follow this Joseph Smith guy. Later became the… uh. Fifth of the position which is highest for female mormons. Also possibly the last person to talk to Smith alive. There’s a statue of her somewhere.
Also, the one that came over here was kind of running like hell from the crown. Apparently he supported Cromwell. (stories vary on this, we keep getting conflicting information. He may have supported both the crown and Cromwell. At once.)
And there’s my dad, who kind of ditched out for a few years after he came back from Vietnam.
Actually, looking back, about most of my family vanishes for about five years now and again. I think it’s the guilt.
My half-brother ran away from home when he was a teenager and I was in the first or second grade. He’d pop back up now and then, in person or call on the phone, but he’d just be gone for years at a stretch. There was one time, when I was in high school, that he called me every night for a week just to talk, but then he vanished again.
My youngest sister was an alcoholic bulimic who just did not show up for work one day and her apartment was abandoned. She’s probably dead now, but no body has ever been identified.
My mum was from what is now Croatia and my father is from what is now Serbia. So I’m a Serbo-Croat.
I haven’t seen my brother or sister in 30 years. After my mum’s funeral We parted ways. I’m 45 years old now.
I think this was much more common in the past. Especially with immigrants that left. There were no phones and letters took forever.
To add to it the records are so mixed up. No one really cared about formalities. Like after WWII when my folks came here, both their names were changed. I have no idea what they were originally. And with the wars over there, whatever records existed were long damaged.
Look at all the displaced people you had in Europe. Tens of thousands couldn’t even prove what country they were citizens of.
Mr. S’s grandfather disappeared back in the 1920s, leaving behind a wife and four children. Supposedly he had gone to Canada. Grandmother died a few years later and the children were split up among her family. The youngest son, who’d been named after his father, was renamed (!). No one who knew the backstory ever talked about why he left, and the children were too young at the time to know much.
It was a family mystery until 2001, when a woman in Canada stumbled across my husband’s post about Grandfather on a genealogy board. She replied, “That’s my grandfather.”
Turns out he did go to Canada, got remarried, and had a second family. They knew he’d been married before and thought there might have been one son. (He didn’t talk about it much either.)
There was one child surviving from each family, half-brothers aged 70 and 75. So that September we took our uncle up into Canada to meet his half-brother and finally see his father’s grave (Grandfather had died in 1964). Yes, September 2001 – we traveled into and out of Canada in the week after 9/11. It was CRAZY.
Sadly, the younger half-brother passed away just recently. Still, we were glad to have the chance to find out what happened to Grandfather and to talk with someone who had known him.
My paternal great-grandfather abandoned my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and her brother and sister when my grandmother was 4 years old. My great-grandmother had some sort of severe mental health issues. My grandmother and her siblings ended up being raised in a Jewish orphanage in Winnipeg, although both their parents were living a tthe time.
A few years back, I finally laid my hands on my grandmother’s orphanage records, including letters she wrote back to the orphanage after she moved to the States to be with her mother and her mother’s (then grown) children from her first marriage; reading the letters was really quite heartbreaking, because among other things, she writes about how her half-brother and his wife wanted to have her mother institutionalized. My grandmother must have been about 16 at the time.
Obviously, that experience deeply affected my grandmother; for example, she never talked about her upbringing and simply blocked out large chunks of it from her memory, and my father didn’t know any of this stuff until he was in his 40s.
To this day, I get occasional queries on the genealogy group I belong to from various distant relatives who are related via other children my great-grandfather conceived and abandoned. Apparently he was quite a Casanova.
My Mother’s father disappeared soon after she was born. It’s said that he accused my Grandmother of being impregnated by his cousin. My Mother met him only once, when she was about four; he came to visit them “to have a look at her.” (What a horrible thing to say to a child!) He never returned or contacted them again.
Given what I’ve since learned about her heritage, I suspect that she was born with a “Mongol Spot” (if anyone know a nicer term for that, please let me know!) and that was his first clue that his wife and her family were “passing.”
My Mother’s Great-Grandmother, as it turns out, was an African slave. Nobody told her this until I discovered it; she was about 52 I think, when I told her.
My great-great-however many times grandfather (mid-1800s) just upped and left his family - no divorce or anything, but he started a second family in Canada. No idea why. Family legend says that he and his “true love” were separated while young and when he found out where she lived, he took off, but nothing concrete.
The interesting (and really shitty) thing is he lived with us in WA before moving to NC. So he came back here where we are but still hasn’t gotten in touch. It’s remotely possible that he’s tried to, but we’ve all moved more than once since then, so maybe he can’t. That’s probably wishful thinking, though.