Since I’ve had Kick, my parents have been regaling me with stories of what I was like as a baby, and what my younger siblings were like. No deep, dark family secrets really, just things I’d either never known or had known and forgotten: Who was whose godparent, who went to high school where, why my parents lost touch with old friends of theirs, etc.
The most remarkable story so far is that my grandfather’s brother, a very successful writer who lived in Washington DC, had apparently been blessed with a Dickensian benefactor who sent him to college when his family couldn’t afford to do so, and set him up in life. My grandparents never talked about their childhoods, so this was totally new to me.
Mr. A’s parents have been researching their own family’s history and finding out all kinds of fun stuff, including the names of just about every uncle and distant cousin who ever existed, leading me to have all kinds of ideas for names if Kick had been a boy, most of them straight out of a film about mobsters.
Do you know your family’s history? Have you done an Ancestry-type thing or has someone written it all down?
A.