You tell me, is this a good day or a bad day, genealogically speaking?
- You discover that your father was married under an alias. Ugh, not probably good.
- You discover the alias that your father was married under. That’s good, sort of.
- …in a newspaper article about him going to jail. That’s bad.
- Where his wife testified. Uh oh.
- Before she divorced him. Ough.
- Oh, that’s going to jail…again…according to the article. That’s really bad.
- You discover that your father had yet another, earlier, alias too. Getting even worse.
- And another, very young, wife. Holy chimloda.
- Who he married when she was 15 and lied about her age. Not looking good.
- Before he was arrested the day they married for having intimate relations with her a few days before they were married, according to her mother.
- Who testified to send him to jail. Marriage didn’t save him. I don’t think his new mother-in-law liked him, at all.
- A few months later, the young wife divorced him, for cruelty, while he was in prison…asking for her maiden name back…in 1939. Did they even do that in 1939?
- You discover his prison number…#24884.
- And cry, for all kinds of reasons.
Who says that ancestors cannot reach from beyond the grave to play April Fools jokes on you?
- Oh yes, and did I mention I apparently have a half-sister too?
- Who’s deceased…
- Whose mother is neither wife above and appears to have been married to someone else when the half-sister (if she actually is my half-sister) was conceived. And yes, she still has two living children who would be candidates to DNA test. No, I have not attempted to contact them. What exactly do I say, all things considered?
- At the time my half-sister was conceived, my father was married to the first wife mentioned above. Maybe that’s part of why she testified against him in court???
If you’re saying Holy Smokes about now…uh, me too.
I swear, my family has given me a working example of every possible situation. Maybe that’s the silver lining. It was already difficult enough to discover that my brother wasn’t my brother. Now this.
Um, I think my father might have been a scoundrel.
I have only one thing to say to my father as I try desperately to unravel and wrap my head around this.
NOT ONE DAMNED BIT FUNNY!!!
It’s OK if you’re laughing. I will be too, eventually, as soon as I get over the shock. But talk about rocking the world as you think you knew it. You know, it might have been easier to simply discover he wasn’t my father. But he is my father, warts and all.
My mantra has always been to “not judge” the ancestors, because you can’t walk a mile in their shoes and you don’t live in the timeframe and society they did. But I never thought of my father as an “ancestor” in that sense and this would be a lot easier had I not known him. He died when I was 7 and it’s easy to idolize someone who is gone. I never saw his warts up close and personal, only through others and painful revelations like this.
But look at it this way…you’ll eventually get one heck of an article out of this one. I believe in the truth and it wouldn’t be fair not to share this part of the journey with you too. And I must admit, it IS very interesting!
I’m considering titles for the new article(s):
- Veritas (hat tip to Rosario)
- Uncomfortable Truths (hat tip to Shannon)
- Be Careful What You Ask For (hat tip to my husband who is even more confused than I am, even after the full explanation)
- Rock My World
- An Inconvenient Truth (hat tip to Janet)
Other suggestions? What do you think?
It’s certainly an April Fool’s Day I’ll never forget. I would have been happy solving a brick wall, you know, 200 years ago or so. Scoundrels are fun when you didn’t know them personally and you didn’t inherit half of their DNA.
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