When my mother was in her last illness, in the hospital, there was a moment when most of the family present left the room and she was alone with her sister (my aunt), and my sister. According to my sister, she said, “I’ll never tell you the shameful family secret!” My sister and aunt replied “Okay.” But of course, the reason my mother brought it up was because she wanted to tell somebody. It turned out the “shameful family secret” was that her grandfather had died in prison. At the earliest opportunity, they spilled the beans to the rest of the family, and we all had a chuckle. First of all, the only people who would care about this are all long dead. Second, my great-grandfather, the bankrupt Italian count, the drunken wastrel who abandoned his family for months at a time to fend for themselves while he looked for work but drank his wages before he got home to make his wife pregnant again (nine of their children survived to adulthood), this abusive husband and father, it might be argued, deserved to die in prison. He was buried in an unmarked grave, and his children generally spat on the ground when his name was mentioned. Their mother, who they revered, was buried under her maiden name. With modern eyes, it’s hard to see this as a shame.
However, it turned out that my mother took another secret to her grave. This week, induced by my sister’s Ancestry DNA genetic analysis, and with assistance from my aunt, the secret has been unearthed, and it raises the sorts of questions I never thought I’d have to face. More past the fold.
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This is a personal diary. If you’re not into reading about other peoples’ families, you’re welcome to scroll down directly to the Top Comments, and sorry for taking up all that bandwidth.
In my TC diary last week, I explained that, for a long time, my understanding of the components of my ancestry were represented by each of my grandparents: Italian (maternal grandmother), French (maternal grandfather), Bohemian (maternal grandmother), and German (paternal grandfather). The only one of these grandparents I knew was the last one, my German paternal grandfather, who was a nasty, perpetually angry racist. All the others had died before I was born, and of course I have had to rely on the accounts of my parents and others who knew them to try to understand who they were and what they were like.
As I mentioned last week, this picture of equal parts Italian, French, Bohemian and German heritage has been challenged by my sister’s genetic analysis. What Ancestry classifies as Western European heritage encompasses France, Germany and Bohemia, and so ought to represent 75% of our heritage (or thereabouts) according to what we know about our family. In fact, for my sister, it was less than 10%. This is particularly strange when considering the French component because my French grandfather was a peasant from the Jura Mountains in eastern France, essentially the French equivalent to a hillbilly. Their family had been there for many generations. It’s hard to believe that my French grandfather didn’t have a large complement of Western European genetic heritage.
So my aunt came to visit my sister this past week, and my sister showed her the Ancestry results, and how strange they were, asking how this could be. That was when my aunt dropped the bomb: “You do know that your mother and I didn’t have the same father, right?”
Uh… wut?
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In order to understand what follows, it helps to know that my Italian grandmother’s family migrated to France in the 1920s in search of work, and then stayed. My mother was born there in 1926 and grew up in Lyon. At the end of World War II, after her home city of Lyon was liberated, my mother met my father, an American GI. In 1947, my mother traveled to the US to marry my father. Two years after that, my widowed grandmother and her young daughter (my aunt), born in 1945, joined them.
My mother and my aunt were an unusual pair of siblings; there was a 19 year age difference between them. There were no other siblings. The story we were told as an explanation for the long interval between births was that my grandmother had problems conceiving and required gynecological attention to do so. However, the picture I always had, based on my mother’s stories, was of my mother growing up in a nuclear family, with mother and father, augmented by the involvement of her mother’s large family. And then, eventually, years later, my aunt was born. It turns out that this picture was way off base.
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Now, my aunt really didn’t know the full story either until recently, because she was too young to know about my mother’s origins and childhood. However, after my mother’s passing, my aunt formed a relationship with my mother’s earliest childhood friend, a woman who never left France and who is currently in her 90s, but sharp as a tack. It was through my mother’s childhood friend that the real story came out.
My mother was born in 1926… but my grandmother didn’t marry until 1939! The man I have always called my French grandfather was not my biological grandfather! In 1926, my grandmother was an unwed mother, and my mother was (to use an obsolete term) illegitimate. The principal upshot is that my sister and I have no idea who our maternal grandfather was! (I learned this just 24 hours ago.) This explains the missing Western European heritage in my sister’s genetic analysis.
An illegitimate birth in a Catholic country early in the 20th Century was a heavy burden to carry, but my grandmother’s family closed ranks and helped to raise my mother. This was the environment that my mother grew up in, and it’s why she could tell such detailed stories about her uncles. It’s why she was so close to her mother (and why she was so disappointed that my sister resisted that level of closeness with her). It’s why she was obsessed with control, with propriety, with appearances (though part of that could just be the influence of French culture).
When my grandmother married, her husband adopted my mother, and he assumed the role of father. My mother had only good things to say about her father. I think she may have longed to live in a normal family with two parents, and it may be that she deluded herself into thinking her step-father really was her biological father. (She was capable of that kind of delusion.) In any case, once my mother and grandmother made it to the US, with a whole ocean between themselves and anyone who could contradict them, I think they agreed on a story where my mother became the legitimate daughter of my grandmother’s late husband, and that story stuck for the duration. I suspect that even my father didn’t know the truth.
So my sister and I face a puzzle. Who was our maternal grandfather? Is there any way to find out? My sister has uncharacteristically misplaced our copy of my mother’s birth certificate (or maybe she threw it out—the down-side of being the neat, practical, unsentimental, well-organized person she is). I remember seeing it as we were dealing with the aftermath of my mother’s passing, but I no longer remember what it said. And it raises an odd personal question. At 5’ 11”, I’m the tallest person in my family, taller by 3” than my father, who was the next tallest. I had always chalked this up to my French grandfather, who was 6’ tall. Now, I really don’t know where my height could come from.
I’m beginning to think an expedition to France and Italy is in order to see if it’s possible to learn enough to answer some of these questions. I also need to get my genes analyzed.
Now, without further delay, to the comments!
Top Comments (September 22, 2016):
From Canadian Reader:
A perfect response by BenderRodriguez in Laura Clawson’s front-page diary highlighting the white-privileged idiot who is Trump's Ohio chair claiming 'I don't think there was any racism until Obama got elected.’ Everyone needs to read it. Laughter is the best antidote to insanity.
From belinda ridgewood:
In Laura Clawson's story about Uday Trump's "Skittles defense", cinepost shared a really awesome Facebook meme.
From elfling:
This comment by dhonig is a repost of one of his diaries. It is extremely long, but it’s powerful. From Chitown Kev’s recommended post I ask the question again of “moderate whites”: What would you have black people to do?
From Puddytat:
bigtrendswriter just nailed the modus operendi of "modern" conservatives. From Walter Einenkel’s post Ruling: Nestle can continue to pump water out of CA National Forest on expired-since-1988 permit.
Top Mojo (September 21, 2016):
Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
Top Photos (September 21, 2016):
Tonight’s picture quilt is courtesy of jotter!