Family... and what it means and does not mean

My father aka 'da Ven' has a remarkable tenacity when it comes to family. He got it from his father, am certain. He recently sent me a mail regarding a cousin of mine, who is researching our family tree.

And da Ven has this uncanny ability to guilt trip me into reaching out, and being 'a helper' whenever I think I can add something to any equation. So I wrote a short mail days ago, very short, and offered to add anything I knew about my side of the family based on what my paternal grandfather told me many times when I was very young. I 'assume' that the ensuing silence was due to one fact... I do not have the family Bible and the documents contained therein.

There is an underlying assumption that is probably not so
nice to consider. I only met this person once in my life, shortly before my first communion. He was arrogant, and a few years older. His younger brother and I got along well. Later events seem to tell me why we were on the same wave-length, but too young to know it.

Let's just consider for a moment. Oral history also has a place in the scheme of things. History gets passed down from generation to generation, and gives people the sense of where they came from, what their family means, and a sense of direction. And is undocumented, but that is how things were before people wrote things down.

And which obviously doesn't interest that person, although there might be points of interest which would help in researching a family tree.

So just for the fun of it, here is what I learned. And there are some documents in the family bible which would help on the search, but unfortunately, I do not have it. It was always passed on to the eldest male child, but hey, I didn't propagate, my brother did, so it passed on to him without even considering what I would think about that. It was this fucked-up patriarchal thing. There was a time when I would have loved going digging into the past per the interwebs, and would have left it to my nephew, because my brother only read about two books in his life, but what the hey, am used to not having my feelings about anything like that considered.

But my grandfather really could go on a roll, telling me about his grandfather... or was it great grandfather? It was a long time ago, I was a child, and he loved telling me all about it. Da B's. He was terrific telling all that, spell-binding, and I would listen wide-eyed at his wonderful story.

My grandfather could bluster with the best of them, and have told a few things about him, but he was a gentle soul. He served two terms as a state representative, and I saw his picture in the State House many times in Concord. I was so proud of him, I dragged a friend there in the 70's, but the photos were gone... probably relegated to some cellar. Which was saddening.

History gone down the memory hole, hey. Just obliterated.

So before getting into the story: the family Bible holds all the key info. It must be worth a fortune. It had a lock on it. When my grandfather retired, he had a project, and read it all from front to back. Upon which he went into the only rant I ever saw him do, proclaiming the Old Testament 'that book of Horrors', and proclaiming that HIS grandchildren would never be exposed to such filth. And it would be locked henceforth, and we would never be exposed to it as long as he drew breath.

Well, you don't need much more to pique a child's curiosity, and sometimes he would forget to lock it. And I would be in there, trying to find out what it was all about. Except I didn't memorize the documents in the middle of it, the important things.

Over the years, I ran across snippets of information. The earliest mention of 'da B's' goes back to William the Conquerer, and one of them was among twelve tribes and seemingly got delegated to Cork in Ireland, which was fairly amazing to me, because that is where the story began. The name later came to mean a dagger, and around nineteen hundred it meant the long hat pin women in England used to affix it to their hair. Now it means nothing, that I know of...

A colleague of mine went to Cork on vacation , and I asked him to just look up the name in a telephone directory while he was there, but he told me there were none to be found. So I guess they died out.

So the story always began with John B. Who was the eldest son and to inherit the title, (probably an Earl, I would think...) and he was a randy sort of man who was English, but fell in love with one Irish woman, which was so scandalous, he was disinherited and left in disgrace with his wife, one Bridget, and emigrated to the US.

At which point he would go very solemn and tell me, 'now don't think you're better than anyone else. Those were just the times.'

I think it was his way of trying to instill in me the sense that the family WAS something important, not just factory workers. But the story got better.

Hardly in the US, John got killed after fathering a John Jr. Riding the pony express somewhere in Massachussetts, carrying a lot of money for paying salaries, and it would always end with, 'He got shot, but he got the money thr0ugh. Then he died.'

Now I don't know how much of that is true, but it sure was a lot more exciting than watching Davy Crockett on the tee-vee....

The widow didn't grieve long, and married some guy name of Ford, took her to Chicago, and wasted the B fortune on gambling and died a destitute.

And then the trail went cold and he would never speak of his own father.

The only thing I KNOW is that there certainly was a John B who married a Bridget in Cork, have seen the marriage certificate. I did try once to follow that on an ancestry site, got a tantalising confirmation, but in order to find out more, well, they wanted more money than I had in order to continue. So that part was right.

Oral history is a bitch, I guess. It gets embellished for so many reasons, sneakrets never get revealed, and sometimes it is better so. The later developments in the B family continued to be... well... defying conventions.

Am living proof.

But that is what families used to be like, and the Venerable is seemingly the last in a long line to be proud of.

I get so fucking tired of people you are supposed to be 'tied' to by blood, and you can spend forty years away without a single phone call, or feeling beholden, and calling them when you can hardly afford it, or just damned indifference, because, oh hey... normal, kids, not weird.

Sad. That is not family.

Family is my grandfather consoling me because my father had to work in a factory doing overtime on Halloween, and I was so depressed it was ridiculous. And he was rocking away in a chair softly singing 'He'll be coming round the mountain when he comes... He'll be coming round the mountain when he comes...'

If I remember correctly, he did, and took me to this school competition, and I got best costume. It was some knitting stuff and a rubber chicken head, and it turned out to feel like a pity party for the poor kid. Except I heard my grandfather's voice in my mind. 'Just remember, you keep your head up and be proud of who you are and where you come from.'

It took a long time to really appreciate that. But that IS family.