On Family History:

I don’t talk about my family much here. Mostly because they would gleefully scratch my eyes out if I did. (They don’t like my Gothiness and don‘t want to be in any way associated with it. God, or the fashion police might find out.)

Anyway, I will talk about my dead relatives as they are visited by me more often than they are by the other ‘livings’ in the family and they don’t seem to mind.

As a kid I was fascinated by two of my Grandfathers brothers relationships.

Great Uncle S was married, a bit later in life, to a wonderful and smart, widowed woman Great Aunt C who had a grown daughter B. Now Great Uncle S was a very smart guy, an inventor in his spare time, and he held many patents that monetarily sustained both he and his wife for many years and through their old age, very well in deed.

Great Uncle K was younger then both Granddad and Great Uncle S. He was very smart too, but in a book sense. He was a farmer by trade. But every moment he could spare had his head in any text book he could get his hands on. He could talk science and geography better than anyone else I ever knew. I learned a lot from him over the years he was alive.

The facts of who started dating who first are to this day unclear in the family story telling. But I believe that in reality it was a double dating thing. Uncles S and K dated and later married this mother daughter duo.

Great Uncle S and his wife Great Aunt C didn’t have any kids of their own. But Great Uncle K and his wife Great Aunt B did. And they were the same ages as me and my sister.

My fascination was with the children’s relationships in all this. Their Grandmother was also their Aunt and their Grandfather was also their Uncle. This seemed to interest them very little. Mostly I suspected at the time, it was because they were not intelligent at all, which also fascinated me their being born into a very intelligent gene pool. But in reality, to them, it just was what it was. (The intelligent thing, later being explained to me as birthing accidents.)

To me the relationship thing was a Mark Twain‘s fictional, ‘I’m My Own Grandpa’ kind of story, that was real and belonged to me and my family. And as a kid I never understood why my friends didn’t think it was cool.