"Family Secrets"

Tonight, my sister and I visited with my grandparents to celebrate my Grandma's birthday. The night started off with some butter pecan ice cream and the expectation to stay for only 25 minutes or so. We ended up staying there for about two hours talking!

The whole thing started when my sister made a joke about not hearing about my dad's side of the family ever. We only know his sister, our grandparents, and kinda know my great aunt on that side of the family; everybody else that we've heard about comes from stories from my grandparents. From those stories, I have a pretty big family. All our life, it's bothered us that we only keep in touch with one side of the family and know nothing about the other. There had to be SOME reason why this happened! I knew that my grandpa was an only child so my dad didn't have any close cousins there, and I was under the impression that my great aunt and uncle didn't have any kids. I also assumed that there was some feud or reason why my dad never talked about them at all. Boy, was I right.

After my sister made her joke, my Grandma became very serious and said, "Well, I guess that's my fault, in a way," and began her story.

Her paternal grandfather was an abusive alcoholic, so her father cut her family off from his side and she grew up surrounded by members of her mom's side of the family. Her mom was one of six children who were all VERY close. The whole clan lived within 4 blocks of each other in a small town in Ohio. They got together all the time for "family functions." Well, my great-grandmother's favorite brother, Harold's, wife started "helping around the house" for their older brother Alfred. Alfred's wife was dying of cancer, so it seemed perfectly reasonable why she would want to help. After Alfred's first wife died, she left and divorced Harold and married Alfred.

My great-grandmother took terrible offense to this (who wouldn't?!) and cut the couple out of family life. She would not let her family attend any of the "family functions" because she did not want to see Alfred and Harold's former wife. It turns out that they were never even invited to any of these events; my great-grandmother still could not be convinced that they would not show up and put the family into isolation.


It's a lot more than I had expected, and it's kinda similar to Hamlet, in a way.