Finding Kin
sinnsear
nm. g. -sre; pl. -srean, forefather, ancestor
sinnsreachd
nf. ancestry, custom of ancestors, right of succession, genealogy .
~ I've been working on my genealogy all morning so, as usual, I'm about to pull my hair out. This is really all my grandmothers fault and she has a lot to make up for, in leaving me nothing but a blank wall to bash against.
"You owe us, Granny and I'm holding you to it - afterlife, or not" !
My Dad was the only one of four siblings to get married and have a life, and they never forgave him for it. His mother was obviously ego-maniacal in keeping the family's' attention onto HER; from my earliest years, I remember being told how she'd ruled with "an iron-fist, in a velvet glove". I don't think anyone would have been a suitable spouse for my Dad, but then he had the nerve to fall instantly in love with my Mom, then 19 and 15 years younger than him, too.
And she was poor. My God, she was poor! Stick-thin and not expected to live long from years of childhood hunger, poverty and kidney ailments. Daddy first laid eyes on her as she got into his elevator at work and by the time the doors opened again, he had proposed. And then a date. And then the rest, you know.
When my eldest sister was born, it was a fight from the start, as to who the real parents were- Mother and Daddy, or the InLaws. As Cathy grew up, Daddy's small wages earned from fixing t.v.'s at the hospital weren't nearly enough to compete with the pony's, carnivals, professional photo-shoots and such, as the I.L.'s lavished on her.
And the poison they gave her! The viperous hatred of my Mother, they instilled in her. My poor Mother, who on top of everything else, had fallen down those terrible stairs at our first rent-house and broken her back.
How could you hate your own Mother for that?!
After the surgeries and when she was walking again, THEY came over in their fine, new car (we, however, walked or rode busses till I was 15) and tried to take Cathie away. When Mom asked "why don't you even care about your other two grand children?"(Margaret and me), my grandmother replied "I only have room in my heart for Cathy". To which my blessed Mom responded, "then it's a small heart you have, indeed!" And so when my aunt tried to physically pull Cathy from her arms, my Mother did what any Saint would, she punched her in the boob- the left boob, the one that got cancer and killed her a short while later. (Mother always felt bad about that and blamed herself, but we always let her know that Aunt Mary had it coming).
When my grandmother died, she even took history with her. Thence, I've spent decades piecing together the snippets of family lore I've been left with.
But I know now, what she desperately wanted to hide.
Her husband, the wonderful Grandfather I never had the joy of knowing; his family goes back to the earliest days of colonial Maryland, and they weren't always white.
Till 1890, they were recorded in census documents as mulatto. And the founding member of my patronymic was first known as "mulatto Robyn"- Robert Pearle.
His story is so important, because it's the quintessential American story; racial mixture is what makes up Everyone's heritage, at some point in time.
Because of this, she cut us off from knowing anything about our own family lineage, with Daddy only able to posit a vague, "black-Irish" inheritance.
As for grandma, I wonder if in some Otherworld, she's feeling the tickles and pokes, as I tease out more and more of all that she wanted to hide?