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My father was born in early 1921 in Norway. He was an adult in his late 40’s before he learned he had had an older sister who died a month or so before he was born at the age of around 2 from influenza. His mother never told him anything about her and she never spoke of or acknowledged her existence even to her own death.

A cousin of my father’s in Norway who was into genealogy sent my father a family tree and copies of family pictures my father had never seen before including a picture of his birth father, an aunt on his father’s side and a picture of his sister Ingrid as a baby.

My father’s father died around a month before he was born from a fall from a balcony. Some relatives said he was singing with a church choir at a hotel when the balcony collapsed, and he fell to his death. Others said he was drunk and with a rowdy party when he in a drunken stupor fell over the railing and lived for several weeks in a coma before dying a week before my father was born.

But his mother didn’t tell him anything about his real father and led him to believe that his stepfather was his birth father and that the man who he was named after was his uncle, not his father until when my dad was around 14, he learned the truth from an aunt.

My father became very bitter about the deception and at one point ran away from his home in NJ at age 15 to join the merchant marines in Florida and made as far as the Geogia/Florida line before being picked up by the police and sent home. He had a strained relationship with his mother and stepfather for many years.

I can also understand how traumatic this would have been for my grandmother who was barley 20 years old at the time. Imagine in the span of a few weeks losing both a daughter and a husband.

When my mother died in early 1996, we had her buried in her family’s burial plot outside of Harrisburg, PA but when the cemetery went to dig the grave, they unexpectedly found the small coffin of a young child.

They contacted us asking how to proceed. After asking them to research their records, the cemetery had only a record of a 1-year-old child being buried in early 1920 named Margaret but no record of her relation to my mother’s family or who her parents were or anything about her or the circumstances of her death. Only a record of her name and age.

There was no gravestone or marking for this child and no living relatives of my mother’s family had any recollection of a child by that name. My mother never mentioned a relative by that name.

My brother tried to research birth and death records and census from that period but there had been a fire in the courthouse in Harrisburg in 1930’s and most records from that time period were lost. So, we never learned who Margaret was.

Was she my mother’s older sister who died from influenza and who like my father’s sister was never spoken of? Was she the illegitimate child of either my mother’s father or his brother, both who were alcoholics, gamblers and rakes? Or was she the child of a family relative or a family friend who couldn’t afford a burial? We would never know.

After talking to the cemetery my brother and my father and I had the child’s coffin exhumed, my mother buried, and this child Margaet’s coffin then reinterned and buried on top of my mother’s.

My mother loved children and no matter who Margaret was, I would like to think my mother would be glad to share a grave with her and hold her in an everlasting loving embrace.