It took bestie some years to find my actual maternal grandfather.
There were some false positives along the way.
My *favorite* false positive was an African-American mule trader who ended up in Leavenworth.
Like. How cool would that have been?
But we found the real guy, eventually.
My grandma was not a classical grandma of loving light.
If you said to her, "I wish ...", her response was pretty automatic:
"Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first."
She did not raise my mother, nor did she like my mother. But she liked me and my brother well enough.
An absent mother, a flapper, a bitter reformed alcoholic, racist beyond any ready imagining, she is the people I come from.
It took us some years to find my mother's father. Who was not mentioned. She married a railroad executive Mason, and the two of them treated my mother like shit. Trauma, innit.
It took bestie some years to find my actual maternal grandfather.
There were some false positives along the way.
My *favorite* false positive was an African-American mule trader who ended up in Leavenworth.
Like. How cool would that have been?
But we found the real guy, eventually.
He spent the last three years of his life in the Osawatomie State Hospital for the Insane.
Tertiary syphilis, ya know.
Am I to hate my forebears?
I don't, really.
Even tho they were unsavory as could be, and held views I'd never hold, and gave my mother the trauma that messed up her life so bad.
Ya get to a certain age and you begin to really understand the idea that we're all doing the best we can.
You begin to understand that, sometimes, for some people, "the best we can" is just fuckin' *awful*.
@GeePawHill sorry that this was the end of your search.
