Looking for family, looking for tribe

[venta]

In the early days of the twentieth century, a gentleman named Charlie (unusually, for the time, he really was christened Charlie, not Charles) got married. He married Emily and they lived normally ever after. They had five children and, though Charlie died relatively young, Emily lived to her mid-nineties

Comments

[bopeepsheep]

My mum has a similarly structured family, down to the "very few examples of the surname left" (and yes, it's an obscure one although in our case it's her mother's maiden name, not mine, and when we find people with it it's a case of "how are you related to us?" rather than "are you related to us?"). She at not-quite-68 has some first cousins in their 90s (older than her parents would be now), then ~20 more spread over the years, down to some who could be her kids(late 30s/early 40s) including one 6m younger than her youngest child. We last had a "no one's dead" party in the 1980s - we should probably do it again now that there's at least two more generations to invite. :)

[bopeepsheep]

NB Mum has more than 45 first cousins actually, it's just that some of them are on the other side of the family. I am never quite sure how many there are on each side. This is just my grandmother's family, and the spread of ages is due to my great-grandmother having her children over the course of 25 years (so she had grandchildren already, before she was done with pregnancy herself).

[lanfykins]

But she's got someone else and they're starting a family, trying for a clan of their own...

My mother's family is rather similar. There were something like nine children in my grandmother's generation (more or less, with the usual secret family shames) so I used to have a passel o' great-aunts. But the extended family have drifted apart. My Auntie Belle was the only one who kept track of the branches, and she died years ago.

Then again, family's never mattered to me much, what with having grown up hundreds of miles from most of it, and only seeing cousins and grandparents and suchlike once a year. And I don't really feel the poorer for it.

[venta]

One kudo to you, ma'am.

I would also say that family's not hugely important to me - or to my parents. (My mum wrote, in her LJ post on this gathering, that "Friends have been far more use and support in times of crisis.")

However, I'll admit to curiosity about the bits that there are, and it's nice to find that they're not all idiots.

[undyingking]

How lovely for you to have that locket. Hope future generations work on producing at least one E so you have someone to pass it on to yourself!

[venta]

Future generations don't seem to be planning well: there is a lot of duplication of names. Presumably of names which are popular with the kids of today, since they seem bloomin' obscure to me (no family needs two Finleys, surely?)

By contrast, one of my mother's cousin's generation was telling me that she'd wanted to call her daughter Elizabeth, but felt it was already "taken" :)