In Memoriam

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Today is my grandmother’s birthday.  She’d have been 22.  Well, 88 years but only 22 real birthdays.  She was always young for her age.  I took Sun, who is named after my grandmother, to her grave last weekend for them to meet.

All this family research thing started up again as a result of that visit to her grave.  One of the big mysteries in the family is who her birth parents were.

One story is that her adopted parents went to north Louisiana to pick her up.  Another is that she went through a local adoption agency.  I know both of these are false.

Her father’s probate proceedings aver that he had no children and never adopted anyone.  Thus, as suspected, my grandmother was “handed off” to be raised by a relative or family friend without an official adoption—not at all uncommon for the 1920s.

My grandfather suspects that her adopted father is her birth father—that he had an affair with her birth mother.  I put his theory at 50/50 odds.  It would explain why there was no formal adoption as well as the affidavit in his succession—his wife would have kept his secret from his doting daughter, my grandmother, and not told the truth about him having fathered a child.

But it could just as easily be that they had a friend who found herself “in the family way.”  Except.  It is inconsistent with why, on her deathbed, my great-grandmother refused to tell my grandmother the truth saying, “I promised your father I’d never tell.”  That statement, to me, gives credence to my grandfather’s theory.

The best clue I have is her actual birthday, February 29, 1920.  And the names of the witnesses to her baptism, one is my grandfather’s “prime suspect” of who he thinks the birth mother is.

The wrinkle?  I need to wait 12 more years to search the birth records.  In Louisiana, they are private for 100 years.  Oh, the agony.

This mystery was the impetus to me doing genealogy work.  And it still nags at me; I continue to pick at this mystery hoping to solve it before those 100 years run.  I promised myself I’d find the answer before my grandmother died.  I failed in this promise.

But it never really matter to my grandmother anyway.  She always knew love, unconditional and endless, from her very real parents. 

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