New Branch on the Banks Family Tree
August 11, 2020
My father’s half-sister — does that make her a half-aunt? — visited the parents recently and brought some very interesting news with her. Thanks to her involvement with an online genealogical service and some related DNA testing, she had discovered a hitherto unknown and very close relative. Another half-brother!
The notion of half-siblings and slightly removed relations was not an unknown thing growing up. There were no aunts and uncles and cousins around that shared our last name. That was because my father’s father (A.H.) moved on after my father was born. My father’s mother (R.L.) remarried and gave birth to two more children, with different last names, who were a regular part of our lives as aunt and uncle.
According to a family history compiled by a cousin Dad was familiar with, A.H. was “associated” — marriage status unknown — with two other women before he settled down and fathered a daughter (P.B.). I do recall a visit to A.H., his wife, and P.B. — a year younger than me — during the early Sixties, when we all watched an appearance by The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan program.
It was P.B. who came bearing the news: A.H. fathered another son (M.E.), who was born a few scant months after my father to a young, unmarried woman (W.S.) in their neighborhood. W.S. soon disappeared, taking her son with her, and at some point married and moved away to another state. Once grown, M.E. fathered a daughter (P.E.), and it was her interest in ancestry and DNA that led to the connection with P.B. With a few photographs in evidence.
My father was estranged from A.H. nearly his whole life. It was something he never talked about as we were growing up. Children are often oblivious to family tensions, and this was not the only time in our young lives we missed out on important facts and information.
Thanks to some personal dabbling into the genealogical aspects of family history, I’m more familiar now with many of the relations bearing our last name. Sadly, posthumously, for the most part. Given the reach of DNA information to the “common” folk, it may only be a matter of time before we are introduced to even more relatives. Though their stories may not be quite as… entertaining?
(The names and identities and complete facts are mostly hidden here to protect the guilty and the innocent.)