i owe carnageus some stories, i think, and so i will take up some space in here to answer.
ancestor stories. i can only trace my mother's family back three generations, to my great-grands. one great-grandmother named klempka, arrived in the us from poland when she was seven years old. she wrote back to her family there every week until world war II. and even then she kept writing, but the letters stopped coming. her town doesn't exist anymore. she kept a scrapbook through the entire war, and my family has it now, its pages brittle and sepia. she married my grandfather redgate, whom i know little about. they had four children, including my grandmother.
my grandmother gallagher came from ireland, and married my grandfather durnin, also an irish immigrant. he was an alcoholic with thirteen children; a pair of twins died of the flu leaving eleven. to support his family, my grandfather quit school in tenth grade to work full time (my grandmother left in ninth for the same reason). at some point in his life he drove a bootlegger wagon among his other odd jobs.
my grandparents met each other at the dixie cup factory in easton pennsylvania. they married, and had their first child in 1939 (my aunt). my mother was the youngest, born in 1942. my grandfather opened a diner, which is still standing in my hometown. my mother waitressed in that diner, which is how she met my father.
i know very little about my father's family. he was the only boy of six children, and the second from youngest. my grandfather's family was from missouri, and my grandmother's maiden name was hall. my father's parents were divorced; his siblings may or may not have had the same father. i like to think of my paternal grandmother as a free spirit who was torn between what she wanted and what was expected of her, but in truth i don't know enough about her for that kind of guesswork. my grandfather was a very aloof man, and none of us really got to know him until he got a brain tumor, at which point it was very nearly too late.
my parents were both once divorced, my mother with two children (Older Brother and Sister). they met and fell in "love at first sight" according to momdukes. they were married in '75 and had me in '77 and Younger Brother in '80. they are still together. this week marked the two year anniversary of the death of my last grandparent, my maternal grandmother. there are many many questions i'm never going to have answered...
so there you go, carn. beatpoetgrrl
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