Father’s Day 2010

A phone call Monday about Father’s Day led me down a path with unexpected results. I have always been interested in chronicling my family history and in years past, spent an inordinate amount of time doing genealogical research. I record my findings in a software program, Family Tree Maker. Over the past five years, I’ve not spent much time researching and in the interim, a lot more data has come online.

One of my sources, Family Search, has introduced a new beta search that incorporates some of this new data. Monday evening, I ran across a marriage license for my father, from 1934. Now, I knew that my father had been married before he married my mother in 1950: I’m in contact with my half-sister, Jackie, and was in contact with my half-brother, Tommy, prior to his death. This marriage, I assumed, was to their mother. When she last visited me, I had queried Jackie about the date her parents were married. She didn’t know, but was able to provide for my database various other information. So I assumed that the marriage license that I had located was that of our father and her mother. I also found my parents marriage license.

Friday evening, I went to put this latest information in my database. Imagine my surprise when I realized that this 1934 marriage was not to Jackie’s mother, Ethel, but to another woman! Thank goodness I hadn’t sent the email to Jackie with the info in it.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at this; after all, I run into it all the time with clients. (Especially when electronic filing first came up and Social Security numbers were matched to the Social Security database. I had a number of wives who had never changed their names to that of their current husband, although they had been using that name for years.) But this was different: this was my father – my Daddy –  someone I’d spent a lot of time trying to get to know (or, rather, know about) because he died when I was just 13.

There is no one to ask about this – all of his siblings are dead and my mother didn’t know him then.  One of my sisters, when told of this, reminded me that our youngest brother had often sang, “Papa was a rolling stone,” a reference to things he had learned of our father from some of the oldsters in Phoebus, things that I had never paid attention to and dismissed as gossip. Looking back, I wish I had paid more attention, and, of course, my brother isn’t here to ask, either.

So this is a different Father’s Day for me than years’ past. I’m left with more questions than answers, the biggest one being whether I have more half-siblings out there. There is a part of me that doesn’t want to know, but I suspect this feeling will pass. I’ll probably end up spending some time trying to track this wife.

But not today. Today, I’m trying to hold on to the Daddy I remember, while accepting that he, too, was human and, therefore, not perfect.

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy.