andrew61
Confessions of a Slacker
Musings at 3:25 a.m.
I did a little internet sleuthing earlier tonight and I might have come up with an ancestor on my mom’s side… a great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather, perhaps.
I’ve never known anything definitive about any of my ancestors more than two generations back, but tonight I did an internet search on my grandfather’s first, middle, and last name… and came up with someone on a genealogy list who died in 1913. The three names together are a rather unusual combination, so I’m thinking it might be my grandfather’s father or maybe his grandfather. My grandfather was born in 1872 and died in 1947, so it’s not him.
Also, the listing said this person lived in St. Catharines. I had no idea where that was, but I looked it up and it turns out it’s a town in Ontario, Canada, on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, not far from Niagara Falls.
My grandfather, the only one of four grandparents who was born in the U.S., was born in Buffalo, New York. St. Catharines is not very far from Buffalo… not far at all.
Pieces of the puzzle… Do I have Canadian roots I never knew about?
I’ve always known this grandfather was Scots-Irish… but did his ancestors settle in Canada before coming to America?
(My other grandparents were from London, England… Naples, Italy… and Palermo, Sicily.)
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My mom had a cousin close to her age, a woman I met a handful of times when I was younger, who never married, never had a man as far as I know, but who lived with another woman for probably thirty years or more, first renting a place together, then later buying a house together in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland. Whenever my mom or anyone in the family spoke of them, it always sounded as if the two women were being referred to as a couple.
No one ever spoke explicitly about this, but I’ve wondered for many years… Were they lesbians?
But they couldn’t have been… They were born-again Christians!
Or could they…?
Both are dead and gone now. If they were a lesbian couple, did my mom’s family know that and just never explicitly speak of it? I wouldn’t dare ask anyone, so I guess I’ll never know.
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And, in Googling people’s names tonight, I came across an obituary from about a year ago… a lady I knew in church back in my teenage years, back in the 1970s. She died last year, age 81.
I remember, back when I knew her, that she shared an apartment with another lady in the church who was about the same age. They both worked for the Baptist missionary organization of which our church was a member. Neither of them had ever married. I’d always assumed they were just roommates.
I found something curious in the obituary. In the paragraph listing the survivors, the very first person listed was this other lady, referred to as a “dear friend”… and only afterwards were the relatives listed.
Now, usually, the surviving spouse (if any) is listed first… then the children and grandchildren, then parents and siblings and nephews and nieces and whoever… In all my years of reading obituaries, I don’t recall any where a “dear friend” was listed first.
Again, it got me to thinking about the possible true nature of the relationship, which also had been in the back of my mind… Could it be…? But they were born-again Christians, too… just like my mom’s cousin and the woman she lived with.
Who knows what secrets there are out there… things that are never spoken of? Especially when it comes to the lives of people in an earlier generation, when certain things were kept hidden and not discussed…
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