Family matters

Edinburgh's attempt at its Spring Holiday this year is piss-poor, drizzly and overcast. It's also not a bloody holiday because I have to correct a student's thesis chapter this morning, take the bottles down the recycle place, and travel to a mega pet-store to buy Her Catness the overpriced meat nuggets made in lab conditions under vet supervision that pamper her kidneys, and the one brand of soft & moist meaty treats she'll accept.

Anyway, Mum dropped in over the weekend with the Passover supplement from the Jewish Chronicle (she knows we enjoy this kind of thing over here), and we got talking about family matters, including my step-paternal grandparents, Rebecca and Herman. Herman died in their Florida retirement home in 2001, a few days after stepDad's transplant, and their photos and documents are now under stepDad's care although I haven't seen these. Mum tells me though that Herman was born Hyman, and that our surname differs in spelling between his birth and marriage certificates. Another family mystery to which my mother gave a saucy spin was the 8 month gap between R&H's civil and religious marriages. R continued to live at home during the gap, according to Mum without her parents' knowledge of the civil wedding, before R&H moved in together after their religious wedding. While Mum thought this was evidence of R&H's modernity (which is doubtless, along with their devotedness and independence), I wonder if R&H were adopting or adapting an older Jewish tradition of a staged wedding. They were raised in conservative schules, and kept a kosher kitchen until both kids left home, certainly.

I hope to sit stepDad down to draw out some details, and ask if I can see the memory hoard. My sister also has some notes from chats with Rebecca in her last years about family that shouldn't be lost. She, I and cousin David are the only inheritors of R&H's line, and looks like I'm the only breeder amongst us. I'm also the sole repository of bioDad's heritage and genes, so there's responsibility involved here.*

As the product of a 'blended' family, I grew up with three sets of grandparents. But when I search for a handy PC tool to start logging my own family, all I can find are simple bifurcating, Mendelian tree structures. Are there malleable tree-diagram structured templates that can include for serial partnerships and progeny? Surely the Americans have dealt with this structural problem already on one of their 6,000 genealogy websites.

I don't really want to go there, to places promoting tartans for Pinkuses, or coats of arms for McPhees, but if of US origin there is/was a handy map tool from ancestry.com showing surname density at 1840, 1880 and 1920, which was most amusing. I'm not sure whether the maps have been withdrawn, or more likely that my free visits allocation was exceeded, as I'm now urged to subscribe.

Anyway, this picture below reminds me equally of kinship with its tree, and Mum, who still has Cranach prints in the house and always bore more than a passing resemblance to one of his almond-eyed redheads.



*Addendum
It gets worse in terms of my responsibility- my innocent kids and I are also the sole genetic/cultural conduits for my maternal grandparents and Mum's line, her sibs having remained childfree despite their many other adventures. These stories from the distaff side are amongst the best family histories I'm privileged to hold, and may also be chronicled in their turn, given time.