Ok, what next?
Mandy had a thing come home from school asking about her ancestry, so last night Tim and I were starting to enter info into a family tree program. Nobody on my maternal side really got into tracking stuff like that, and my father split when I was only 6 weeks old so I've never really known anything about the paternal side, and I remember how frustrating it was to do family trees when I was in school. I decided to buckle down and see how far I could get so maybe Mandy won't have the same problems.
Researching the paternal side held a shock...my father died last year. Fuck.
I never really knew him, the only time I ever met him face-to-face was in '95 when I was 17 and happened to be in St. Louis so I tracked him down and spent an hour or two visiting with him. Last time I talked to him was in '98 when I was pregnant with Mandy...I called to tell him I was married and he was going to be a grandfather. He made noises about how he always meant to contact me again, blah blah blah...so I left him with my phone number and figured the ball was in his court. I had that phone number for a couple of years and never heard from him, so I pretty much wrote him off. A couple of times a year I always think about finding him again, though, just in case he's grown up and decided he's ready to get to know me.
I guess I waited too long this time :(
Researching the paternal side held a shock...my father died last year. Fuck.
I never really knew him, the only time I ever met him face-to-face was in '95 when I was 17 and happened to be in St. Louis so I tracked him down and spent an hour or two visiting with him. Last time I talked to him was in '98 when I was pregnant with Mandy...I called to tell him I was married and he was going to be a grandfather. He made noises about how he always meant to contact me again, blah blah blah...so I left him with my phone number and figured the ball was in his court. I had that phone number for a couple of years and never heard from him, so I pretty much wrote him off. A couple of times a year I always think about finding him again, though, just in case he's grown up and decided he's ready to get to know me.
I guess I waited too long this time :(