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My dad's side of the family is the usual boring illegitimate kid deal - his mum got knocked up while her husband was a POW during WW2 and when he got back from the war he walked in on a kid too young to be his and walked right the gently caress back out again. Her highly religious family threatened to disown her if she didn't put my dad in an orphanage so she did - only she couldn't deal with giving him up so she went and got him back again six months later and went off to work as a servant in posh houses for 6 years, until she met up with her husband again and he took her back. Really messed my dad up and gave him serious abandonment issues, not to mention that she never did tell him who his real father is. His stepdad was a pretty cool dude though and he legally adopted my dad and raised him as his own son. My mum's side of the family I'd always assumed was pretty scandal free - the Irish half (my grandmother's) is full of alcoholism and bad parenting but none of it's really scandalous or a secret, and the Jewish side (my grandfather's) were German refugees, escaping the Holocaust. Quite a lot of my maternal grandad's family didn't manage to get out, and I just assumed that my great-grandad was among them as I knew he hadn't come to the UK with my grandad and great-grandma. Until grandad's funeral, that is, when a chance conversation with an elderly relative led to me finding out that my great-grandad had got out after all - he'd been having an affair with a Nazi lady (literally - she was a member of the Nazi party) and when things got really bad they fled to South America, leaving his wife and young kid behind. The surviving Jewish family pretty much never spoke about him again, although my grandad did eventually track him down and travel to Rio to meet him. I have a photo somewhere of my grandad, his dad and Nazi-lady sitting on a beach. They all look very uncomfortable.
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Nov 18, 2015 01:15
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:44 |
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Mnemosyne posted:Just as an FYI, he may be able to find out who his biological father is (if he's interested) by doing a DNA test at either Ancestry.com or 23andMe.com. This sort of thing is a hobby of mine, and adoptees are finding their bio families this way every day. He's talked about doing something like this in the past but never went through with it. He's not come out and said as much, but I think he doesn't really want to know. He has talked about how, as a kid, he would imagine his father as a member of the aristocracy or a GI or something similarly glamourous* but in his heart he always assumed it was just some Glaswegian docker like everyone else he's related to. I've considered doing it myself but I haven't out of respect for his feelings. Also, I expect the results will come back as "you are related to every Ashkenazi Jew ever, congrats." *An American GI was pretty glamourous to a kid who was born in 1943 and grew up playing on bomb sites.
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Nov 19, 2015 17:08
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