Help From the Other Side?

by Judith Grimes

My e-mail address is megbr549@aol.com
and I live in Yorba Linda, CA.

I was born on the steps of the hospital in a taxi with my genetic father passed out drunk in the back seat. Mom divorced him and I never saw him or knew him or any of his family. I was raised by a stepfather.

Never was I told anything about my genetic father, other than he was a womanizer and a drunk and burned to death in a house fire that he started with a cigarette after a new years eve bender. I have been doing genealogy since Iwas 16 and for over four decades I have worked on my mother's familys and my husbands familys--never on my genetic father's family.

When at age 55, I finally asked my mom to go to the cemetery with me and find some of my father's family graves and his. She refused and told me that genealogy was intrusive and she didn't like me digging around in her life.

From that day on she progressively got more dominate on the negative about family trees and would not answer any questions. She even went to the trouble to destroy photos that she had kept up until that time. She was having brain damage with strokes and it changed her thinking that was already negative to something that she believed me pure evil in what I was asking.

She considered me a turncoat and a traitor to her. She passed away in sept of 2000 and the DAY that I came home from the cemetery -- my PC was full -- flooded with data concerning all my fathers people. All his mother's people, and all my aunts and uncles and cousins and names that I had never heard and data unrequested. I had not until that day known my grandmother's maiden name or her birthday or anything about her.

It came from sources all over the USA and from people that I had never contacted. I had to wonder. DID momma help me from the other side? or had some bottleneck caused by her life's pain keep me from knowing my family? It was really a joy and at the same time a great sadness.

Submitted:  Apr. 23 2001

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