On The Missing Person

 My Nana called me after I’d written a piece about one of her ancestors to say how much she’d liked it, which of course meant the world. And in the meantime between now and when mom and dad bring the family tree up, she gave me a couple of missing people to find. She told me that her grandfather had an affair while married to her grandmother, who was beloved to my Nana, and her grandmother subsequently divorced him. We knew that the mistress had come to her grandfather, telling him she was pregnant and that the child was his. And we knew the child’s name. Other than that, she had no information and had always wondered what had happened to her.

I went back to ye olde family tree and searched for this grandfather’s name. I found it. And I found his divorce record, his death record…as well has his marriage record to this mistress. I plugged in the name we’d had and found the missing daughter and all her half-siblings. My grandfather had married his mistress and spent the last three years of his life with her. It makes me wonder if she remembered him. He would have been much older, having married her mother in 1940 when he was 56 years old, while her mother was in her late 20s. He passed suddenly of a massive heart attack after three years at the age of 59. 

Josephine Knights (Nanny)

This meant my great-great-grandmother Josephine Sanborn Knights would have had to have lived out her life as a divorcee, which would have been enough to make her somewhat of a pariah. On top of that, she lost her daughter Frances in 1952. She lived to be 96 years old - and my dad has vivid memories of her, even.

Scandal in the family is something that has to be dealt with delicately. There are untold traumas from infidelity, divorce, and children born out of something ill-meant or ill-contrived. So as I did my digging, I found our missing aunt. I let Nana know I’d found her, and that unfortunately she had passed in 2016. It makes me wonder whether this missing aunt ever knew anything about her father’s family, if she knew we all existed…if she knew she had a niece, several years older than she, who might like to know her and wished her well, despite the circumstances. And we have to remember that the child isn't responsible for the parents' actions, and we don't know all the details. It's without judgement that I think I can say we all hope she had a good life full of love, comfort, and peace. She seemed to have been a lovely person, and she would have been fortunate to know my Nana.