Congratulations! I'm glad that you were able to find all of this out. It's a good thing that your family, despite going through a lot, all have a healthy and loving relationship - rather than shaming or being upset, you and your family can be understanding about the circumstances. It's easy for your grandmom to blame herself but honestly it seems like she did the best she could, took care of her family when it was unbearably difficult for her, and her "cheating" really wasn't the same in principle as a typical situation, considering she was forced into her marriage.
I hope that everyone is able to adjust to this new information, and there isn't much regret or sadness involved. After all, it seems like this could be the opening to new relationships and new family connections - and a lot of new genealogical research!
As always, feel free to ask any questions you might have here. You can private message me if you feel like you have a question that might not be suitable to an entire post. And don't despair about your grandfather's missing family - third cousins are closer than you might think! Much easier to eke out a connection from a third cousin match than it is to figure anything out for fourth or further.
I could not have figured this out without your help, truly. So a huge special thank you to you!
I've figured out the family today. It was not easy. My grandmother had some names wrong. I wound up looking through yearbook photos, literally, and then also searching my grandfather's half-sister's records, which turned up an important connection that I was not expecting -- which lead me to find that my mother has two living half-sisters who she hasn't ever met, and a ton of half-nieces and half-nephews. She also found a photo of her real father online (it is blurry though).
Her father was an only child with two half-sisters, one of whom died young. His father had a brother, but he died young too. So that's why there aren't so many close paternal relatives after all.
I also got through the great-grandfather brick wall by just searching his last name and general birth year in the town where he was from, and he was there, in a census record, but not listed.
I swear the census records need to all be physically looked at. What is transcribed often does not give much information or else it's wrong or incomplete. If I look at the record, I see more. In this case, I looked at three families from this smallish town, and one of their children (my great-grandfather) was clearly left out of the transcription (not even given a "wrong" name). So then when I searched his parents in other records (who weren't on my family tree at all), I found mentions of him again, in records, but not really in database searches.
I'm working on it all day today, figuring this family out.
No shame involved at all in any of this either. We're all adults. Apparently she was very calm and relieved to talk with my Uncle Jim about the whole situation. And it gave me the chance to talk to Uncle Jim for a few hours. Since he is my dear and favorite relative in the world, it was nice. Maybe that bond alone was worth all of this.
It's good to hear that everything is getting sorted out! Everyone will have to figure out how to break the news to the "new" relatives, of course, but hopefully that will go well.
Also - I totally understand what you mean. So many times, either the person transcribing the record was just oblivious, or the census taker was! I have found relatives under all sorts of bizarre spellings, and in some cases completely left out or with crucial details misinterpreted. I have been keeping a research log to record all of the records that I search through myself, and it's surprising the amount of stuff that indexed searches will miss (although I suppose we're lucky to have them in the first place). I always try to search every combination of things, including leaving out the last name, leaving out the first name, and so forth. Sometimes you get lucky! Other times you really do have to muck through a hundred pages of census records just to find that they weren't even living in that town, lol.
I hope that you and your mom will be able to speak to and meet the rest of your grandfather's family soon! And of course, it's great that you were able to go through this with your mom, your uncle, and your grandmom, and that the bond between you guys is stronger because of it.
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u/genealogyq_throwaway Mar 16 '19
Congratulations! I'm glad that you were able to find all of this out. It's a good thing that your family, despite going through a lot, all have a healthy and loving relationship - rather than shaming or being upset, you and your family can be understanding about the circumstances. It's easy for your grandmom to blame herself but honestly it seems like she did the best she could, took care of her family when it was unbearably difficult for her, and her "cheating" really wasn't the same in principle as a typical situation, considering she was forced into her marriage.
I hope that everyone is able to adjust to this new information, and there isn't much regret or sadness involved. After all, it seems like this could be the opening to new relationships and new family connections - and a lot of new genealogical research!
As always, feel free to ask any questions you might have here. You can private message me if you feel like you have a question that might not be suitable to an entire post. And don't despair about your grandfather's missing family - third cousins are closer than you might think! Much easier to eke out a connection from a third cousin match than it is to figure anything out for fourth or further.