That is wonderful, Mary. You must be so proud of your family...
It’s funny. It’s not pride. It’s more like understanding me. I always felt like a cuckoo in a nest because I was so different from mother. Mother protected herself. I took chances. Then I got into genealogy and discovered my father’s family, and the whole pack of them were risk-takers.
Mother left father when I was 6 weeks old, so I knew NOTHING about him, other than that the family had entertained Lafayette and his mother still had the goblets unwashed, though no one knew which one Lafayette drank from.
I found his mother’s obit and it mentioned that her pallbearer was the governor of Colorado and 3 generals, so I realized I had a good chance of finding out who they were. After that, it was just one jaw drop after the next.
Father’s father had a gold mine and started one of the runs. He won and lost fortunes from Alaska to Central America.
His father-in-law was brought to DC to run the Lincoln assassination investigation and was one of the special judge advocates.
His father-in-law was another CW general, whose father-in-law was one of the richest men in central NY and merged one of his railroads into others to form the NY Central. And on and on and on...
But, basically, they were all risk takers. And I lived my professional life in total terror. I rarely took on a job I knew how to do and I was always under deadline. It’s amazing how few times you fail if you give yourself permission to fail spectacularly once. So it’s not that I’m PROUD of these absolutely fascinating people. Father, after all, died of alcoholism before he was 50. But he really was a great poet in Greenwich Village. It’s that I feel that now I have a place I fit. Finally. And I feel an obligation to bring them back to life in some sense. So great grandfather’s grave has now been adopted by a military post, and 5th great grandfather is beginning to get credit for having written Night Before Christmas. And I found father’s book of poetry, and so his papers will NOT be completely lost to the future, as his letters to mother said they would.