My Pap-Pap’s biological father, so my biological Great Grandfather, I guess!  I wanted to post a before and after from the big post about us finding him.  I can still see some seams I want to fix now that I’m looking at it like this, but it’s still nice to see things come even so far.  The pictures feel so fragile and ephemeral and just making digital copies makes me feel like I’m saving things.  

I think maybe this is especially true in the case of this man.  I don’t know what happened after he died regarding his family.  I know what happened to the people who were my family, but his siblings and other relatives, did they follow what happened to his kids?  Do the people charting his family tree now know that there’s a whole branch of them, of us, going around under another name?  Did he get forgotten as a dead end?  Do they all just hear, oh, his wife married another man and that guy adopted her kids and shrug it off?  

I don’t claim to know what being adopted is like first hand, and my grandfather even stayed with his biological mother, so it’s just on this one side, but I feel such a strange thing, such a strange connection to to both lines, but also this kind of Separate Thing-Ness.  Like the immediate family I grew up with is a strange appendix on two other family trees because of what happened in this car accident.  I would have a different last name if this man had survived.  I feel like part of both and excluded from both at the same time.  There’s a kind of magic in the idea of being invited into a thing and told ‘I accept you as a part of this’ with adoption, and I like to think I can have that as well as knowing who this man was and looking at connections through that. 

My aunt and my cousin were both adopted, because I think my family just makes a habit of it now.  

I never got to hear how Pap-Pap felt about it, but I wonder if it was anything like this. 

Anyway, his name was Robert. And so was Pap-Pap’s.