Family Trees and Branches

When I was a teenager in the 80s, my mother’s brother did some genealogical research. My grandfather’s family were bakers and had immigrated from Germany. My uncle found descendants still living in the same village near Frankfurt the family had left to come to the US.

My uncle made contact via letter, in English of course. Only the children in my generation spoke and read English, so all contact with this branch of the family was through the kids in my own generation, Christoph and Dorthe.

Letters were exchanged, phone calls were made. My grandfather had died years earlier, but my grandmother reveled in finding her husband’s long lost relatives. My grandmother, aunt and uncle, cousins, and my mom would gather around the phone on Christmas morning to exchange greetings with Christoph, and they would all giggle nervously as Dorthe could be heard on the speakerphone translating questions and greetings to and from their parents and other relatives gathered on their end. The families in both countries clearly felt joy in finding connections to relatives they had never known about, and eagerly gobbled up factoids about hobbies and traits and pored over photos sent via mail.

I would hang back on these occasions, not wanting to join in the conversation. I couldn’t muster any emotions when my grandmother would show me the latest letter from Christoph or photo of my grandfather’s first cousin baking bread in Germany in the 1920s. These people were strangers to me. They didn’t feel like my family.

I had never been curious about the ancestors or far-flung living extended relatives of my adoptive family. That lack of curiosity coalesced into avoidance on every occasion of contact with the German branch of the family.

My adoptive family was my family, of course, but these long lost extended relatives held no sway with me. If genetics was the thing that was binding us all together, then what did that mean for my brother and me, who weren’t related by blood to anyone? And who were asked to pretend that it didn’t matter that we were, in fact, related by blood to people who were hidden from us?

There was an ugly incident that exaggerated this separateness of my brother and me from the rest of the family who adopted us. A relative not in my immediate family once blithely said to our faces we weren’t related by blood to the rest of the family, so we weren’t “real” family. I couldn’t have been more thrilled at that moment not to share one gene with that person, even though this relative had for years otherwise treated me warmly and with affection. They said it to me when I was already in the tumult of puberty, and from already feeling separate from the family because of this new German family branch development. The incident lies in stark contrast to the rest of my family’s treatment of me, I’m glad to say.

I had similar avoidance issues on the other side of the family as well. Every Christmas Eve, my father’s distant cousin hosted a party for all the extended family. I was always told that everyone at the party was my relative, and I understood how everyone was related (my father’s mother and the host’s mother were first cousins), but I never felt related to any of the dozens of people there. Not even the kids who were near my age. Not even when Santa (the host’s brother, dressed up in red and white, complete with a beard, a booming voice, and a couple belts of bourbon in him) came down the stairs bearing gifts for all of us children in attendance.

One year at the party, when I was in my early twenties, I saw a girl I knew from summer camp, Pamela. I’d been a counselor while she was a camper. (We would later go on to become close friends, with each of us in each others’ weddings and I godmother to her oldest son.)

I asked Pamela what she was doing at my family’s Christmas party. In return, she asked me what I was doing at her family’s Christmas party. (Despite the fact I’d never seen her there in previous years, she had attended in years we hadn’t.) It turns out Pamela’s grandmother was also a first cousin to my great grandmother and the host’s grandmother.

Pamela and I were related! Awesome! We joked about it as we became closer friends, with her referring to my father as her uncle. Except I never really felt related to Pamela either, despite our growing as close as sisters in later years.

I didn’t know what “feeling related” to someone would even feel like until June of this year. When I met Susan, I instantly recognized my eyes were her eyes, my laugh was her laugh, my hands were her hands. Later I discovered we walk the same. We have a lot of the same preferences. And she may be responsible for my love of funk and soul music, since she danced while pregnant with me to the sounds of James Brown.

When I met Tessa, Susan’s daughter, my sister, I recognized my teeth were her teeth. (Hers are straighter!) My shoulders are her shoulders. My mouth is her mouth. We ate lunch together recently, and I recognized some of our mannerisms are so similar they must be inherited. Even the way she sat on the floor to pet my dog–that’s what I do.

Now I can’t wait to meet more of the family I never knew existed until just over a month ago. Maybe Weston and Tyler and I share some traits or preferences. Maybe there are cousins of Susan’s who hold their hands like I do, or who hate beans like I do, or who have the same eyebrows. Maybe I will recognize something in Bege, Susan’s mother, when I meet her. I hope so.