#52Ancestors #Week28 - Random?

In spite of working very hard so that most of my entries are either about our Pearson relatives in Pulaski County, Illinois, or at least peripherally related to them, I can't do that this time.

Instead of a random fact about a family member, what we have here is a completely "random" family member, my husband's biological father George, who passed away ten years ago. Given the number of things I've learned about George since he passed, I'm quite certain he had at least one very serious mental illness, and definitely deep alcoholism: "Daddy, why is Grandpa having beer with breakfast?"

My husband was raised by his mother and his step-father, and what he knew about his biological father consisted of his name and his origin in Wisconsin, information that was on his birth certificate and his military paperwork. He also knew that his parents were married, and the divorce occured before 1973, when his mother remarried. No memory of the actual person, and no photos at all.

My poor husband dated and married a genealogist, so we had been dating several months and had discussed George a time or three, when I asked Hubz if he would like to know more or possibly meet his biological dad. He said yes.  This was in the very early 90's, so as I recall, he asked his mother if she knew names of his grandparents or where they might live and she answered. We called directory assistance with their name and received a phone number for his grandmother.

We called her, and that woman couldn't have been more thrilled to be talking to her grandson. Her husband had passed away more than 15 years earlier, but she and George, and her other children were all alive and well. Lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. I don't recall whether or not there were phone calls with George right away, but it was March when we went to Wisconsin to meet him. One of the first things we learned upon meeting George was that Hubz has two younger siblings, a brother (M) and a sister (K). They live a few additional states away, but the pictures of the teenage brother are a dead ringer for my husband (many years later we would find that our youngest daughter is a bit of a doppelganger for her aunt). 

We went back the following summer and made a habit of it in following years on the weekend of Hubz birthday. That first summer visit, we took the older kids (who were just littles at the time) and met the above-mentioned brother and sister. One night when we were all gathered around the fire pit outside, Hubz asked George who the blonde man on the other side of him was (no ceremony there, they hadn't been introduced). George pointed his thumb and the man "Oh, that's your brother, R!" Turned out, almost three years older than Dan, and I found out fairly recently that R's mother the best friend of George's mother. 

Then, 10 years ago when George was dying, he told Hubz that there were probably going to be more siblings for him to meet in his future. Based on info from George, Hubz then discovered his next youngest brother, S.  George and the mother had been married briefly in the 70's, both S and his mother are now deceased, but Hubz has been able to meet one of his nieces.

Then DNA arrived on the scene.... I first asked Hubz if there were something I might need to know about the name in front of me, and he had no idea. I triangulated as many "shared matches" as I could and involved my daughter in looking at them to see if we could figure out who we were looking at. Soon, I messaged the match, a close relative on Hubz paternal side, close in age to our daughter, and there were no replies.

We genealogists don't like non-answers, generally. I messaged again, although it was probably 6 months later, and this time I got a response. Mr. DNA sample has a mom from Wisconsin who just happens to live near US, and she is Hubz sister. C was raised by adoptive parents, and Hubz soon met her (at a city park during COVID), along with her older son, who just happens to be a dead ringer for Hubz, and later we took her to Wisconsin to meet the extended family. Pictures have been copied and shared and on the same visit, we also met her mother and sister. Briefly, we thought the older sister was also progeny of George, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

For now, there are 6. George and 4 of the five mothers from the above narrative are all deceased.  Especially when we were in Wisconsin with sister C, we heard a lot of new stories about George's life that none of us had known, and my conclusion is that for someone that had an exceptionally challenging start in a very small town, he certainly (to borrow a turn of phrase from our daughter) "left his mark" on the world.