Family

This, my friends, is my grandfather.  We never met ~ he died when I was 4 years old, but in all honesty I doubt we would have met had he lived another 35 years.  A bitter divorce and total disinterest together made him uncaring about his son and family.  We always sent Christmas cards, and got ones in return from his second wife, but when we sent word that Nana had died (in 1969), back came the reply from his stepdaughter that grandfather had passed in 1955, didn't we know?  The second wife had developed Alzheimer's and couldn't place who my dad was, or thought that she had sent word of his death at the time.  No mention of Dad as son, or my sister and me as granddaughters in his obituary.  So Dad lost his mother and his father at the same time.  He is buried at Gettysburg.

I am having trouble with my genealogy on this line, simply because there are so few players ~ and a name not sufficiently unusual to screen out similar sounding families.  Grandad was illegitimate, never acknowledged by a father, and as far as I have found, he had no other children himself.   So half of his antecedents are a mystery, and likely to remain so.  The ones that remain, on his mother's side of the family, suffers from the bane of all genealogists : given names that are repeated over in a family.  In this particular case, Josiah had a son John, who had a son Josiah, who had a son John and on and on, so there are only the dates, birth to death, to distinguish one from the other.  I bet their family reunions were hell.

Anyway, enough of that.  I've spent a fair amount of time cleaning house, I've really let it go too far over the last year and a half, I simply felt too bad through the chemo and the adjunct therapy.  But our house is our main asset, and we can't let things slide that need attention.  Hence the painting and so forth.  One project accomplished just seems to point out all the other projects left to do.  Oh, for a handyman to keep us from getting any further behind!  I mean, the hub is nearly 70 and I cringe when he goes up the ladder to clean gutters...

And how about the Olympics?  I cannot watch very much, I hate when an athlete flubs up, knowing how many grueling hours they had spent practicing, practicing just for this moment.  I want them all to do OK, and leave feeling they have done their very best, regardless of their score.  But more than that, I want them to smile, smile, showing us that all that work was worth it, medal or no medal...

Bumper sticker of the day:  "We have enough youth,  how about a fountain of smart?"