Today, when looking at jpegs of old family photos with my brother, he opened one of my father’s father as a young man, son of German immigrants, and thanks to the handwritten note on the border of the photo, I learned that the “C” middle initial of Grampa’s name stood for “Columbus”.
Why Columbus? All German descent on my father’s side, no Italians. Maybe to honor immigration to the New World?
I’ve known other bits of family lore for a long time, like the fact that my mother’s father, a lifelong telco employee, installed the first telephones in some of the great White Mountains of NH resort hotels. But this revelation of the name was a new one.
My Daddy’s Grandmother had a sister named America.
I thought how strange that was and did the timeline and it would of been near a time when they may have immigrated. So it seems America was the first baby born in America.
My grandmother recently revealed that one of the most important people for her growing up was her Aunt. My grandmother was an orphan and after her mother was institutionalized she spent the rest of her childhood in a group home. But this Aunt was a stabilizing presence in her life and inspired her to become a teacher.
That meant a lot to me because my grandmother’s very own daughter would become my Aunt and would become a stabilizing force in my life, so like, I get it, Grandma.
My grandfather died in 2016 at the age of 92. We were sitting around talking and one of the topics was how embarrassed my grandfather’s behavior sometimes made grandma feel and how she could have done much better for them. Then someone says something like, “Remember how embarrassed she was when he punched that guy at the casino?”
This piqued my interest, because I would have been in high school at the time and nobody ever told me about this. My grandparents enjoyed going to casinos in California, often the Lake Tahoe area, and this happened around 1992-93 when grandpa was pushing 70. Grandpa went go go play is video blackjack and grandma sat down to play the slot machine. Not much time passes, when a guy came by and told my grandmother she was playing at his machine and asked her to move. For those of you who don’t go to casinos, you can have an attendant put your slot machine on hold while you go to the restroom or do something else.
Grandma told the man the machine wasn’t marked, she was comfortable where she was, and didn’t want to move. Grandpa happened to be close by, and as the he approached them the conversation grew more heated as he became agitated that my grandmother wouldn’t move and he called her a bitch. Grandpa socked the guy right in the face and knocked him down. Security showed up quicky (I’m assuming they were monitoring the situation), and one of the casino employees told my grandfather he had to leave immediately and to stay away a few months. Not to stay away forever, just for a few months.
My family kept this a secret from my sister and I for almost 25 years! But grandma was mortified, so nobody told us grandchildren.
My Gramps rode his White mule down the aisle of the church Granny attended, during Sunday night prayer meeting.
He was drunk.
Didn’t matter, Granny never forgave him. I found out when she mentioned it at his funeral.
Me and my siblings and cousins just discovered that no one knows why my grandfather had the middle name he did. We’d all just assumed it was a family name from somewhere, but the family historian says Nope. Grandma said, after his death, “Now I wish I’d asked him…”
My uncle, whom I’ve known all my life, and who was always around, served in the Army during the Vietnam War (except he was assigned to Germany, not Vietnam, which he had no complaint with). All of that, I’ve known ever since I was old enough to know. And to hear him tell it, he spent most of his time in uniform driving trucks (while he did have some interesting stories from his time in the Army, they were mostly about pranks he’d played).
What I didn’t learn until around last year was that sometimes, the cargo in those trucks he was driving was nuclear weapons.
My mother’s cousin did much of the geneological research on their whole extended family. He decided to get his and his parents DNA tested. He was horrified to find out that he didn’t share enough genes with his dad to be a match. The cousin ended up with panic attacks about it. He’d never been adopted or changed family homes at all growing up so it was mindblowing to him and a lot of other relatives.
I recently found out that I had had a cousin I never knew existed. My mom casually mentioned it to me while we were talking about her family recently as if she thought I already knew about it. Turns out that when my mom’s younger sister was a teenager she had a son out of wedlock who was born deaf-blind and was raised in a home, who lived until the age of 30 or so, when I was a teenager.
Smapti that’s an impressive story. I imagine there are ways to compare your cousin’s personality, to think that you might see a cousin’s resemblance in some way. For me one of my cousins makes similar choices whenever we’ve played games; in many ways we ace each other out by using the same strategies.
well i leaned this a while ago but my dad unintentionally worked for a group of chicago and detroit gangsters at the first mc donalds that ever went out of business
Seems that they were using it to launder cash via the front registers dad thought it was weird that the owners avoided using banks the cash was brought in and out by the owner a few times a week…
He came into work and saw a bunch of agents and such around the place and when he asked what was going on they told him and asked him questions for about 15 minutes he signed a paper saying hed appear as a witness if needed . they gave him a month’s pay … he jumped on his bike went to the other mcd’s and was hired there and started the next day
My aunt, Mom’s sister, was married and had five kids. She’s still living, age 95, but her husband, my uncle, passed away 20 years ago. A while back I was poking around an online genealogical website and found out that Uncle Jim had been married before he married my aunt, and had two kids, one of whom is still alive. I have no idea if my cousins know that they have a half-brother, and I’m not going to tell them.
My great-great-grandmother (GGGM) got herself pregnant. She wasn’t married, and had no chance to marry, as the father skipped town and was never seen again.
GGGM had to deal, and she did. With the bullheadedness that is characteristic of our family, she declared that she would not “go to her aunt’s place up north” or otherwise deny that she was with child. Abortion was not an option, as it was sketchy and unhealthy in the mid-1850s. No, she had a child out of wedlock, neighbours and relatives’ “tut-tutting” be damned, and as far as she was concerned, that was that. She gave the child her family name, a final “fuck you” to the father, whose family name is still unknown.
Her child was my great-grandfather (GGF) John. He carried on the family name, through his children, one of which was my grandfather, and then of course, my Dad. I’ve seen photos of GGF John; he and I look remarkably like each other.
What all that boils down to is this: I’m descended from a bastard. And I’m damn proud of it.
Something I learned a couple of years ago. My father, who was somewhat disabled, wasn’t physically fit to serve in the second world war. He was, however, OK to serve in the Home Guard. I guess there were a lot of guns around in those days (we’re talking about the UK here, which is essentially gun-free) - and at some point one of my father’s platoon went apeshit and started (seriously) threatening to kill people. My father, alone, walked up to him and talked him down, took the gun off him. He was quite the hero.
He never mentioned it. I learned this long after my father’s death from an older cousin.
Not exactly lore, but one of the weirder things in my life, which my brother discovered a few years ago: when a relative (who I had never even met) died intestate a few years back, we were urged by an uncle to investigate if we (my brother and I) might inherit (spoiler: no). My brother’s immediate reaction was to research the family tree - but the other side. (We’re like that.) It turns out that my great grandmother moved a short distance north to London to marry. The family then worked it’s way much further north, as economic migrants I assume, eventually settling in West Cumbria (about 400 miles away), where I was born. In my turn, looking for work, I moved south. I now live about 4 miles from where my great grandmother was born. My brother lives about the same distance in the opposite direction. It’s possible that, on her way to catch a train to London, marriage, and economic migration, my great grandmother travelled directly past the site of our house.
So my mum mentioned that according to family tradition a great (xN) uncle was a bit of a bolshey who hung out with Trotsky at a commune in France prior to the Russian Revolution. Which never made that much sense.
We discovered this year that actually it wasn’t Trotsky it was actually Karl Marx, and it wasn’t a commune in France, as in a bunch of hippies trying to run a farm, it was The Paris Commune. This is when a left wingers seized control of Paris after the 1871 Franco-Prussian war, before being brutally suppressed by the government. The uncle in question (my maternal grandmother’s great uncle, who was actually called Adolphe Smith, Smith Headingly was one of his pen names) moved to Paris during the commune and then waa an ambulance driver during the battle that resulted. He didn’t hang out with Marx then (Marx never took part) but did later when he took part in the First International and actually ended up having a mad beef with both Marx and Engels. Engels in particular apparently hated him his whole life.
He then went on to become an author on and campaigner on social causes including writing a series of exposes of the meat packing industry in America that were the inspiration behind The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. And also he is the reason the socialist anthem (that was the anthem of the British Labour party until they went all neo liberal) Keep the Red Flag Flying, is sung to the tune of O Tanenbaum.
He has always gone on about visiting his German relatives in Colorado when he was a boy. And when discussing his bloodlines, he’s always sure to claim German descent.
I’ve fiddled around with the internet, not exactly doing genealogy, but doing casual research on family names and looking at the 1930 and 1940 censuses. Mr. brown requested that I don’t do his, nor tell him anything I find, because he’s estranged from his families and doesn’t like to hear about them or talk about them.
I secretly looked up his Colorado family and I see that in both the 1930 and 1940 censuses, his paternal grandparents from Colorado show as Russian immigrants. I’ve thought about it, and my opinion is that in the 1950s, when Mr. brown visited them, it wasn’t a good idea in a conservative midwest community to identify as Russian. So they pretended to be German to explain their accents and mollify the community.
But Mr. brown still feels German and in addition hates on the Russians for invading Ukraine. I’m keeping my mouth shut.
My mother’s family was from a small town in Hungary. They were among the only Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from that part of Hungary. For decades we had wondered how they had survived. They had been put on a train to Auschwitz, like all the others, but for some reason it never made it there.
It was only recently we discovered they had been on the Kastner train.
About 5 years ago my wife found out her father had been married once before he married her mother. After getting out of the Army in 1953, he met a gal in Virginia. They married after knowing each other only about a month. After the marriage, she still lived at home, he lived in an apartment by himself. A few months later she said she wanted a divorce, he said okay then left Virginia and returned to the Seattle area. He met a gal while working at Boeing and they married in 1957. My wife found out about this when she found divorce papers on Ancestory.com that dated the divorce in 1959. So technically her father was married to two women at the same time.
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