Digging for Dead People

 I adored my grandmother, and to this day, I don't really understand why.  As my memories of my younger life fade, I don't remember that she read to me or played with me or treated me in any way special, but there was a magic there that I can't explain.  I do have memories of sitting on her lap as she told me classic stories from memory.  When my sister and I wanted to sleep in the hayloft in the barn, our grandmother wouldn't let us, but always, always provided other distractions.  My grandmother, whom we called Baba, was a farmer's wife, but she was the glue in the family.  She was a very strong woman whose children and grandchildren respected out of love.  I didn't understand all of that as a kid.  I only knew that I wanted the same relationship my mother had with her mother when I had my own kids.  That love provided generational security for me in our very unstable Navy life.     

In the five decades of my genealogical research, there is one mystery that has never been solved: the identity of my beloved grandmother's biological father.  In her lifetime, she hid the details of her ignominious beginnings out of wedlock.  I think it was a point of shame for her in those days, but only makes me love her more.  She passed away in 1975, taking my heart, and her secrets, with her.  I think she would be content if I just left it alone...but...whoever her bio dad was, he is part of my blood.  It won't change a thing, but I want to know.  Thus, I've been digging for dead people, with tremendous help from my daughter.

Our most recent ancestral dig is in matching DNA.  Certain family DNA strains show up that have no certain beginnings.  Hmmm...  My daughter is close--VERY close--to finding the identity of my grandmother's daddy.  It all depends on connecting the right dots.  Will we ever know for sure?  Maybe not, but we likely can come close.  The spellings of names change; dates can be misrecorded; some family names are repeated over and over (in my crew, we are rampant with Georges and Thomases and Josephs and Margarets.  Hard to keep track of the generations!  Still, I am hopeful that, before I croak, I can know with some confidence, who my maternal great-grandfather was.  Stay tuned!