posted on Jul, 2 2020 @ 03:29 PM
a reply to:
LABTECH767
My mother passed a few years back at 97, 30 years after my dad. In cleaning out the house I found an old trunk stuck up in the rafters that no one
knew about. This box held secrets that our parents had never shared with us.
In that I found old old family photos of my mother when she was a child and a picture of her mother in her twenties that none of us had ever seen.
Looking further I found another family picture and recognized the face of my grandmother as a 13 year old posing with her mother, father and 12
siblings. Her mother, my great grandmother was a large faced woman whose name matched a funeral notice with the picture of an old and frail woman
shortly before her death.
Working from the photos and old letters, I then found a photo of my great grandmother as a child with her mother and sibs. My great great
grandmother. And none of my family knew about any of them. My great grandfather had been a doctor who was blind. Blind because he had been caught
slipping out of a married womans window and shot in the side of the head by her husband, blinding him rather than killing him.
There also was a letter and graph suggesting that our maternal linage had a woman from England who had bee a sister of Victoria I think but who had
fallen for a stableman and sent away with him on a stipend to America. Or was that a Downton Abbey episode? Nope. I found that info prior to binging
that show.
We also managed to piece together my fathers family history. Pure Irish with parents from the old country living in the Irish slums of NY. My maternal
grandmother had died of sepsis giving birth to here third child. Her husband then disappeared from the picture, presumably into the bottle, as my
father and his baby brother were taken in by my grandmothers three maiden aunts.
For all the stories we find in our ancestry, it's kind of amazing that any of us have even been born.
We then discovered that there had been a third son, older than my father who had been taken in by our grandfathers brother who had moved from NY to
Kansas. Again, we never knew about any of this. What a hoot.