The past few days have been busy, with me having little time to breathe in between, so entering information on the site has been impossible. There was something in the few days that was something akin to a Maury Povitch Show for me.

My last name is not completely unusual but is different enough that if someone has my last name it stands to reason we might be related. As a perfect example, for years I used to joke to people I was related to Jam Master Jay from Run DMC because his last name was the same as mine. Turned out he IS directly related to me, he was either a first or second cousin.

Last week I got an email from Facebook from someone who wanted to know if I was her brother. She gave me a little bit of background about her family, but since I was essentially an only child (anyone that knows me knows the details of that) there wasn’t a way this woman was my sister.

It got me thinking how tough it must be for people to trace their family history the way people are today. I know I sound old fashioned, but here is a girl trying to find a family member and her own father can’t say for sure if some stranger is his son. What does that mean for uncles and cousins? I can laugh or marvel at court shows and others where you have men with numerous kids by numerous mothers, but at some point you look at those situations and see a weed of branches from the family tree.

There isn’t any cohesion, no simple pathway to plot the family. When you have both sides coming from such confusion roots, the end result is chaos.

Another thing that happened in the time period was the death of an uncle. I haven’t been close to my relatives for a myriad of reasons but the generation that belongs to my mother and father times are really close to being gone. I think, between my parents, I have four relatives left of the uncle and aunt variety. Every phone call I make to my parents is laced with talk about them heading to glory soon; talk I don’t want to hear but, to be honest, is a reality.

The little I do know of my family tree is the generation of my parents and back there were few of the trailing branches. People got married or were in stable relationships. From the few stories I hear from my mother, which are told in quaint, almost shameful tones, relatives from my generation and up are scattering themselves all in the wind. Men and women have children from various hookups and their children follow the same pattern. My mother mentions a lot about how proud she is I don’t have a bunch of kids running around from other women and in my head I laugh because I always though my mother was seeing too much TV. I thought that stuff happened to other people; other families. I know now she was concerned because of the reality she saw in the relatives she was around.

 

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Family Weeds - October 26, 2009
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