My Story
Ever since meeting my biological father in July of 2003, I've been an intermittent genealogist. For the past 16 years I've occasionally researched my family history. If you've never heard my story before, here's the short version.The Short Version
My biological parents met, had me in 1980, got married four months later so I could have my father's last name, and within a year their relationship deteriorated into divorce shortly after my baptism at 15 months of age. My biological mother fought for custody of myself at her father's insistence, though she didn't know how to take care of me and had been a working mom all of my short life while my father stayed home to take care of me. Needless to say, although my father was emotionally equipped to take care of me, it was the early 1980s, and fathers didn't get custody of their children unless the mother was intensely ill-equipped due to incarceration, mental illness, or drug use.
My biological mother dropped me off with her parents in 1982 and moved out of state with her new boyfriend. My grandparents provided for me for a year before they decided they weren't young enough to raise a fifth child. Their eldest daughter had been trying unsuccessfully to have a child for six years. She needed a child; I needed a mother. My aunt and her husband legally adopted me in 1983. It should have been a match made in heaven. "Should have been" being the operative phrase.
My adoptive mother couldn't stand, had a large dislike for, despised... (you get the picture... ) her younger sister, and since I look disturbingly similar to the woman who birthed me, the feelings transferred to me, although I didn't know it. I was my own first cousin, my mother was my aunt, my aunt was my mother, and I didn't know a blasted thing. Until I went snooping 10 years later in July of 1993 through church records (my adoptive mother was the secretary at the time,) and found the names of my birth parents in my baptismal record.
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| Image by Fritz Straub from Pixabay |
Other than these two names and an engraved piggy bank with my biological father's last name attached to my own, I knew nothing of my family history. For much of my childhood leading up to that moment, I figured I would never know where I came from. Suddenly I was actually, really, and biologically related to my adoptive mother, who treated me little better than the manure out in the farm pastures. My adoptive father on the other hand, never treated me any different than the biological son they had birthed within 7-8 months of my legal adoption. Because I looked so much like my brother and mother, kids at school called me a liar when I tried to claim that I was adopted. Because I knew nothing of my family history up to that point, I couldn't prove what my parents had told me.
Ten years later, on a lark in July of 2003, I invited a friend's boyfriend and child to hang out at my apartment while she was at an interview nearby rather than spend gas going home to the south side of town and back again to pick her up. The little boy started messing with the aforementioned piggy bank and it started a conversation with my friend's boyfriend. When I told him my birth name, his head snapped up and he asked me if I was related to so-and-so. Deer in the headlights I replied that I only knew my birthfather's name, not his family. He said his buddy had an older brother with that name and before I could stop him, he whipped out his flip phone and dialed his buddy's parents. Within five minutes I was on the phone with a man I didn't know and found out through conversation that he was in fact my grandfather. Fluke of nature, a coinky-dink, the biggest and weirdest coincidence in the history of mankind. I seriously could not make this stuff up in my wildest dreams. A month later, my boyfriend and I lost the apartment and I moved in with my biological father. Haven't looked back or regretted it since.And yes, that is the short version. I had to come up with names for various parents that acknowledged who they were to me, to keep it straight, to wrap my brain around this messed up family web. Here's the shorthand I came up with:
- Pop = Biological Father
- Mom = Biological Mother
- Dad = Adoptive Father
- Mother = Adoptive Mother
- Mama = Third maternal sister who helped Pop take care of me from Birth through The Divorce. Asked to adopt me, denied. Refers to our relationship as 'the daughter taken from me' for over 30 years.
I had to sift through the lies and the half-truths and the misinformation. I had to hear the individual stories from the people who lived through it and decipher for myself where the stories lined up, where their hurt and frustration may have discolored the information they were providing. When you have few memories of the events and time in question, one must employ some kind of logic. Luckily for me, my favorite genre of literature has always been mystery/detective and my favorite literary/entertainment characters of all time are Sherlock Holmes, Bruce Wayne/Batman, and the venerable Mr. Spock.
Logic vs. Emotion
Encyclopedia Brown. If you don't know who that is, you didn't grow up in the 80s. This kid with the unfortunate first name of Leroy, had a brain so chock full of knowledge he became nicknamed Encyclopedia because of how much he knew about the world. I immersed myself in his stories, but I couldn't tell you a single story of his today. I was fascinated by his knowledge, and shockingly encouraged by Mother, I determined to stuff my brain full of any and all information I could find. I learned a little bit of everything, or at least attempted to understand a little bit of everything, becoming a Jane of All Trades if you will. But the Black Hole of My Origin remained.
I'd had a library card since my adoption in 1983, so I asked Mother for a purse to carry my own library card. I also reminded her that our local library branch was right across the street from my piano teacher's studio and I could walk there after lessons waiting for her to pick me up. I started checking out about 75 books per week, managing to turn in most of them by the following week's lesson. I read nearly every book in the small branch that interested me and wanted more. This was the era before patrons could place hold themselves. You used to have to write the book's information on a slip along with your library card number and hand it to a librarian. I was doing that sooooooo much, they taught me how to do it myself. I read the youth friendly versions of Sherlock. I wanted darker to match my internal world. My first comic book, in omnibus form, was Chuck Dixon's Batman: Contagion.
I shifted gears to adult and college level books before I even graduated 8th grade.
Sherlockian Logic vs. Logic of Spock vs. Batman Detecting Techniques
During high school, the Black Hole of My Origins sat in the background as I learned origin stories of the superhero kind. I applied logic to get myself out of trouble, but all the while the nagging sensation of drifting through the world without an anchor or compass haunted me. I threw everything I'd learned from Sherlock, Bruce, and Spock at the mystery as I had with the superhero origin stories, but without money for documents and legal adulthood to access them, there was nothing I could do.
Fast forward a bit less than a decade and I'm face to face with Pop. His mother's sister had married a Mormon and she had mounds of Epson printer paper filled with text about her family along with her husband's family. She had given copies of her research to another relative and when she heard that her long lost great-niece (me) wanted to know where she came from, I too gained a copy of her research. Sifting through what mattered to me, finding a program that worked intuitively with what I wanted to do, filling out 3x5 cards and taping them to the long hallway in the trailer... It all made the picture of my origin an even bigger web of confusion.
In the decade+ since then, my attention has been pulled in other directions, although I gravitate back to it often.
Documents: The Crux of Genealogy Research
Documents are paramount to flowing up the branches of a family tree. However, not all documents have the same level of trustworthiness. Documents hold varying degrees of weight. Birth certificates, death certificates, church baptismal records, marriage licenses and divorce decrees are legal tender in the genealogy world while obituaries, family histories, family Bibles, and general histories are closer to counterfeit tender. They aren't quite the real thing, but can be taken at face value if someone isn't paying attention. But even genealogical legal tenders don't always tell the full story.
Take for instance your birth certificate. It states, with legal weight and ramifications, what your name is, where you were born, when you were born, and lists your legal mother and father. Note that I state legal. This may or may not be your biological parent. You may say, "But a birth certificate identifies who gave birth to you!" Au contraire, mon ami.
I have several birth certificates for myself. The certificate I have had the longest names Dad and Mother as my parents. But as I have already shared with you, they did not birth me. I thought I lost it so I ordered another and later found the original issued in 1983. But wait! I was born in 1980. Why don't I have a certificate issued from 1980. Silly goose. That was destroyed long ago by someone wishing to erase memories of their pain regarding my origins. I don't know who and I don't know if this is true, but based on my personal detective work, this is the only conclusion I can come up with for its lack of existence in the material plane.
When I met Pop, he gave me the certificate he ordered right after my baptism in 1981. It lists himself and Mom as my legal parents. There is no way to have this document reprinted. There is no longer a record of it in the courts. During the court proceedings that stripped my biological parents of their parental rights and transferring said rights to my adoptive parents, the certificate Pop possessed for 22 years was made obsolete for 21 of them. So now I have two certificates that are almost as old as I am with conflicting information, one which legally supersedes the other. Due to another life task, I obtained a court certified document relaying the legal adoption proceedings that acts as a link for the two certificates in the paper trail that is my origin story.
Now remember when I said that obituaries, family histories, etc. are closer to counterfeit tender than legal? Let me tell you a little story. I promise this one is slightly shorter. LOL
My great-grandfather Charles Krause had a younger sister known in her youth as Bertha. Her name was Catherine Bertha Krause. Poor girl. She married a man named Carl Braun. It is assumed that Catherine's mother Amelia dutifully penned the information into the family Bible. Family legend has it that the family Bible had come to America with Amelia, her husband/father of her children Ferdinand, and their eldest child Gustav and it held the Krause family tree going back generations. Catherine, being a vain woman, didn't want anyone to know that she was quite a bit older than her husband, and therefore ripped out the family tree in the front of the family Bible. Or so the family legend goes at any rate. The Bible does exists; my uncle has it. Additionally, there are indeed pages missing at the front of it where family trees were kept in those publications.
As a result, I have little information to begin searching for documentation on Amelia, Ferdinand, and Gustav's births, meaning Amelia and Ferdinand's histories are unknown. I don't even know where they came from in Germany or when they came to America. Again, it takes a bit of detective work and using logic to find approximate dates. It unfortunately still doesn't net any results through a free Ancestry account. Since they also weren't Mormon, FamilySearch is also sketchy on details. There's also not very many members of my family looking for those roots. As far as I can tell, of Amelia and Ferdinand's five children, Gustav had one daughter, Charles had 6, and Catherine may have had children, but very few of them are interested in genealogy and may not even know the treasure trove of information they may have in their possession. Census records give conflicting years of birth, particularly if the residents were not at home and a neighbor gave information as they knew it. Four census records give great-great uncle Gustav multiple birth years.
Mr. Gilbert Adolphus Bartaway Jr.
In addition, obituaries can provide information to the world as it is known to the deceased's loved ones without any form of legal documentation to back it up. For example, my paternal grandmother had an older half brother named Gilbert Adolphus Bartaway Jr. I know his mother as Ethel Jackson, and found reference to legal documents to back that up. But a distant relative of mine (her surname is Bartaway), found an obituary for Gilbert Jr. which listed his mother as a Mrs. Lucinda Belbot. My distant relative then added Mrs. Lucinda Belbot as mother to my great uncle Gilbert in the FamilySearch World Tree (FSWT). The obituary is not sufficient evidence on its own that Lucinda was Gilbert's mother. It was the only cited piece of evidence used to add her as a relation. There are plausible reasons for why Lucinda was listed as Gilbert's mother in the newspaper, but none of them include her as a biological parent. Especially not when birth records list Ethel and Gilbert Sr. as his parents.
Here's my Plausible Theory #1: Some time after Ethel and Gilbert Sr. divorced, Ethel remarried. Ethel could have passed away and Gilbert's stepfather re-married to Lucinda. After further research into Lucinda and her husband Walter Sr., this theory is highly improbable.
Plausible Theory #2: Lucinda = Ethel. Even more highly improbable, but finding additional information on Ethel has been slow going and much of it has been added to the FSWT by the same distant cousin who incorrectly listed Lucinda as Gilbert Jr's biological mother off of that single obituary.
Plausible Theory #3, and the current best theory: Lucinda is a mother figure of some kind, causing Gilbert to refer to her as such and her children as his siblings as he was not close with his biological half-siblings by Gilbert Sr.
Theory #3 is as completely plausible as I myself refer to all three of my maternal grandparents' daughters my mother for one reason or another. Here's my theory behind this. I searched for documentation on Lucinda and came across her husband Walter Sr. After conducting a search on Walter Sr. to determine if he ever wed Ethel, I find the 1940 census which lists Walter and Lucinda in the household, along with Belbot children aged 13, 12, 10, 8, and 3, followed by a 'stepson' named Gilbert Bardway aged 17. Go back 10 years to the 1930 census. If Gilbert is in fact Lucinda's child, he should be listed as aged 7 along with the eldest 2 Belbot children, aged 3 & 2, possibly a third if born at the time of the census. 1930 census shows 3 children, Eugene, Paul, and Roy, aged 4, 1, & 0. No Gilbert in sight.
On the one hand, Ethel and Gilbert Jr, Lucinda and her family, none of it has any bearing whatsoever on my own family tree. On the other hand, it is a branch that offshoots from my own. Gilbert Jr is a rabbit hole for me. In the course of writing this last bit of my post, I have had additional tabs open to Ancestry and FamilySearch, search tabs open on Ethel, Gilbert Jr, Lucinda, and Walter, and I didn't get much further than what I shared with you. Every curious cell in my body wants to know how the reference came to be there, what happened to Ethel, if she died, why didn't Bart (as my great-grandfather was known) go up to Michigan and claim Gilbert Jr and bring him home to Huntington, Indiana? By all Pop's stories, Grams (Gilbert Sr's second wife Miriam) wouldn't have had a problem welcoming Gilbert Jr into the home. It would have been an even tighter stretch with five children of her own, but Miriam was the 4th of 10 children herself, and quite used to a large family and close with her own siblings. Other stories share how Bart was a sonofabitch alcoholic who beat his kids (particularly my grandmother) with a rubber hose and stole all of Grandma's babysitting money to buy more alcohol.
So why bring up any of this at all? Why allow the rabbit hole that is Gilbert Jr to fester on my radar? I haven't the foggiest idea. It's a loose end, a twisted string to unravel, a story that needs telling. I have distant cousins out there that may or may not know about Gilbert Sr's second family. They know Lucinda and the Belbots as family, not us, the other descendants of Bartaway, itself an anglicization of the French Berthoulier, proper spelling and location origin also unknown.
You see, from the census evidence, itself not inherently reliable, Gilbert Jr may have been cut off from all family as early as his preteen years. He may have been twisting in the current, without anchor or compass similarly to my own teen years. He seems to have found a permanent home with completely unrelated people much as my second husband's former babysitter became an 'older sister' who lived with them as a member of the family. However it happened, Gilbert Jr. found an anchor in Mrs. Lucinda Belbot, so much so that his own wife Gloria was still mentioned as Lucinda's daughter-in-law in Lucinda's obituary a few years after Jr's death. It reminds me of how my current in-laws counted my son, who is no blood relation to them whatsoever as one of my father-in-law's grandchildren in his obituary and funeral services.
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| Image by mcmurryjulie from Pixabay |
Family is a truly malleable thing. Genetics is not. What happens betwixt the two forces is our life's story. Both Gilberts are long dead (Sr. 1960 & Jr. 1986), but Pop and I still connect with their stories and count them as links to the past and our origins. They are threads in the weave of our family fabric. I just realized another reason Gilbert Jr. is on my radar and the issue is a rock in my craw. A distant relative of mine decided that based on a tenuous connection to my great-uncle, my great-grandfather had a third wife, despite the lack of evidence to support the assertion. That messes with my family tree in a way that is outside verifiable facts. That is Immensely Irritating and Incredibly Infuriating.
The Moral of the Incredibly Long Story...
If you are involved in the genealogy community in any way at all, make sure you're crossing T's and dotting I's before you start making connections to previously unconnected individuals. You just might be disseminating falsehoods and throwing someone down the wrong trail. As a member of the genealogy community you have the responsibility to uphold some semblance of veracity and due diligence.
Her Royal Pinkness,
Elizabeth I
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