Today’s guest post comes from Ben.
My Dad admired his brother Carl. Carl was a big man with a broad chest and a round face. He had a buzz cut and red cheeks and a voice full of gravel. He was quick to grin and rub your head or grab your shoulders. An impressionable kid would naturally want to be like Carl, so when Carl said he had a broad chest was because he slept without a pillow– I immediately threw out my pillow and slept without one for several years. Maybe it helped.
But there was a confusing detail about Uncle Carl. He married his aunt. Here’s how it happened:
Uncle Carl’s best friend was his uncle Maurice (Morrie). Morrie and his wife Helen had two kids; Maurice Jr. and Maureen.
Morrie Sr. told Carl that if anything happen to him, Carl should take care of Helen. This was in the late 1940’s and people did that sort of thing. And then Morrie Sr. was killed in a freak accident. He worked in the city bus garage in Rochester, MN and when the brakes failed on a bus and rolled down a hill into the garage it pinned him against the wall and killed him.
So Carl took care of Helen and eventually they married.
Adding to the confusion – Carl’s mother (my grandmother), was also named Helen.
Carl Jr. and Helen the widow were married about ten years before Helen died. Then Carl Jr. married a woman named Mic and they had two girls, Kelly (Kathleen) and Theresa.
(When I married my wife Kelly this made two ‘Kelly Hain’s and no end of confusion including one phone call from some guy who wanted Kelly to know he was back in town and maybe they could get together. Kelly and I were married at this point and listed together in the phonebook. Dunce cap for that guy. And then later, a woman who had done daycare for our kids for years randomly says out of the blue “You know, I have a cousin named Kelly Hain…” WHAT?? And of course she’s talking about the other Kelly Hain.)
Anyway, Mic had been married before and had one child, Sue. So now Carl and Mic have three step kids between them from two different Dads and two different Moms. What I remember most is how my Uncle Carl took all these kids into the family. The first two; Maurice Jr. and Maureen were cousins in the first place and they’re still at the family reunions. Mic’s Sue is around but not quite as much. And I remember Uncle Carl taking me fishing with Sue’s two boys when we were all teenagers.
A while back we’re at a funeral for one of my Dad’s other brothers, Richard. Richard’s first wife was Ann, who died back in the ‘80’s. My brother works with someone who told him Ann Hain was her Grandmother. Was it our Ann Hain, or a different one? We’re still not sure. My mom tries to explain who was married to whom, but then she has to correct herself and she says ‘No, it wasn’t them it was ____ …’ and at that point we’re all lost.
Which of your relatives is the most ‘interesting’?
Trail Baboon 
I have a headache.
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Clyde, I hope that is figurative headache, due to trying to follow the relationships of Ben’s relatives, and not a real headache. That is really confusing and very well written, Ben.
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Figurative.
What a morning for a bike ride.
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or knitting on your porch at 5am 🙂
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Wait, Carl Jr. Isn’t that a restaurant?
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Interesting story, Ben, and it sure brings up memories of “I’m my own grampaw.”
My family is small, but my maternal grandfather’s part of the family provides all the wackiness anyone could desire. My mother’s father had one brother and one sister.
The brother–Chicken Mert–started well, became eccentric and ended up locked in an institution for the insane. He’s the one who lived in the basement of a house whose upper two stories were filled with chickens and the white stuff chickens leave behind them.
His sister, Rene, lived in childish dependency all her life, spending the first half of her life taking care of her mother and the second half taking care of my grandfather. She was a secret, silent, haunting presence in my grandfather’s house, a classic “crazy aunt in the attic.”
My grandfather Clarence is the only one who looked normal. Clarence seemed sane, got married, held a job and had children. But as I have posted, he was a raging sex addict all his adult life.
It has been amusing for me to study the symptoms of Mert, Rene and Clarence to see if they began to pop up in me. So far, so good! Buk! Buk! Buckbuck baduck!
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Just goes to show ya, looks ain’t everything.
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Watch your tongue, lady, or I might sneak into your offices and lay an egg where you least expect it!
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We will try to keep an eye on you, Steve. So far, you seem to be holding up, but now we that we know your lineage I think we need to watch you closely. I’m a little worried about that ending to your post. Are you really trying to lay an egg?
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Do we worry more if he’s trying to lay an egg or if the odometer on his car sees sudden increases…
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Let’s keep our eyes on all things related to Steve. I think he likes the attention and, with his lineage, there might be a lot of things about him that need watching
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it could be entertaining, if nothing more….
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not to answer the question ( 🙂 but this makes me remember a song from the 50s or earlier called “i’m my own grand ma”
thanks for the interesting (if brain-wrenching) description of your family tree, Ben! i’ll think about my answer while i’m milking. later
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
UUUMMM, Weeellllll, as others are commenting, there are many to choose from. Some like my Great-Great Grandfather who fought with Sherman’s Army, are heroic. Some are just embarrassing.
My father’s uncle, the weak-spirited lush, lost his first wife to cancer. Their daughter went to live with my grandparents and father who were meant to raise her. Dad was about 17 years old at that time and adored his little cousin. Uncle Lush re-married another alcoholic and moved to Anoka away from Iowa and his daughter, much to the family’s chagrin. This also tainted the reputation of Minnesota in this family’s eyes. Uncle Lush and Auntie Lush decided to visit his daughter on my grandparents’ farm, so he and his new wife showed up drunk. She became verbally abusive.
My dad, who was working in the barn, picked up the pitch fork and chased Auntie Lush down the driveway with it yelling at her to never return. Apparently she never did return. Dad reached a permanent solution to that one.
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As the (self-appointed) official geneticist of the trail I will get out my pad and draw family trees for Ben and the rest of you with complex families.first I need to go deal with a baby that an intern called me about in the middle of the night. I must have sounded very groggy because she kept apologizing for waking me up
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btw as continuation from last night – It occurred to me this morning that someone brought green Jell-O with pineapple and cottage cheese to a Sudbury potluck.
Re: History of Jell-O salad – does anyone know if they were intended to be mod versions of aspic?
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that sounds about right. I do know I bought (and gave away as a gag gift, what was I thinking) a version of The Joy of Jello from the 20’s, back when Jello came in chocolate and they also made “ice cream powder”.
If you really need to know more, you too can explore Jello history here:
http://www.kraftbrands.com/jello/explore/history/
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Good morning to all:
Okay, I also have some relatives that had their problems as well as some that I admired. One of those that had problems was my Aunt Rita. At various times she became very up set with other members of her family and she also some times had trouble holding a job. She was hospitalized a few times when she had problems with mental health. My Dad kept in touch with Rita and provided her with some help and so did some of my Aunts and Uncles. At the end of her life, after my Dad died, I provided her with help.
Rita ended up living in the Bronx and finding steady work as a key punch operator. Apparently her problems with mental health stabalized and she seems have had a good life living in her apartment in the Bronx and working in an office in New York city. I made several trips to the Bronx to take care things for her when her health started failing. I had to take care of cleaning out her apartment when she went to a nursing home. She said she was done with everything there and all I had to do was remove some things that I thought should be saved and pay for the removal of all the other stuff.
My Aunt had training as a painter, but never sold any paintings. I saved some of her painting which are kind of unique and probably not great works of art, but I like them. I think she liked living on the east coast because it put distance between her and her brothers and sister keeping her from fighting with them. She seemed to be very glad to see me and I had no problems helping her with her needs at the end of her life
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Nice Jim. Good for you stepping in like that and helping it. That’s what it all comes down to in the end.
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also hmmmmmm. no strange rellies, really. but Uncle Clarence (Clancy to all) was the kindest-hearted and goofiest. he and my fun-loving paternal grandma liked to gang up on aunt Ruth (Clancy’s wife and my Dad’s sister) and play jokes on her.
Clancy also LOVED doorbells (he was a simple man in many ways). he would ring and ring and ring the doorbell until one would get to the door to answer. and then break into peals of laughter (very loud).
one day about 10 years ago, in Duluth, our doorbell began to ring a la Uncle Clancy. on my way to answer i remarked that he must have driven up to see us (knowing he was too old to do that by then). it was someone else, but i learned later that day that Clancy had died that morning – right around the time our doorbell rang.
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Oooh, spooky!
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Yeah, that is spooky.
My mother-in-law has similar stories but I need to get the facts straight before I repeat it.
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Ben’s family sounds a little like mine. I was born to an unwed teen mother, and was fostered and later adopted by my biological great-uncle and his wife. They were Mom and Dad, obviously, but his sister remained my grandmother even though she was legally my aunt, and my birth mother and her sister and half-sister became my aunts even though legally they were my cousins. On Mom’s (not biologically related) side, her nieces and nephews, who were around the same age as my aunts, were cousins; and her brothers and their wives were uncles and aunts even though they were the same age cadre as the woman I called Grandma. Only a little confusing! I was the first adoptee in the family, and there was some b*tchiness–for example, I was excluded from a group photo of “all the grandchildren” on one side of the family, and on the other, my great-grandmother refused to call me by name for a while–until Mom read people the riot act about my being HER daughter now, and that birth parents’ mistakes weren’t the child’s fault to begin with. It got better, but I haven’t had much to do with family for quite some time. I think we all prefer it that way.
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Crow Girl, that is very confusing. I think there are confusing and less than ideal situations in many or most families. These confusing and difficult situations tend to be ignored when they really should be looked on as common occurances and not as exceptional.
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Your family relationships confuse me, Crow Girl, but I’m not confused about the shabby way some family members have treated you. They don’t deserve you in their family photos.
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It’s obvious that, in spite of it all, you turned out to be intelligent, confident and very cool!
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Thanks, Steve and Krista! Yet more reasons friends are so much better than family–you get to choose them, and they appreciate who you really are.
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that is the old story of you choose friends and cant choose family.
glad to have you as art of outr family crow girl. you are appreciated here
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Morning–
Wow, two posts in a week from me; I must be special. (I say with a wink).
Dale helped me clean this up a little as it didn’t read quite as clear as it does in my original form– if you can believe that. And we had a hard time with the question at the end because I felt like we’ve been discussing our families a lot lately. Dale said the repeating questions was an occupational hazard for the discussion prompting blogger.’
So I’m glad to see there’s still a few stories out there.
Thanks for sharing.
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Thanks, Ben, for coming up with two guest blogs, both of them very good. I decided againest offering to write a guest blog because I had a lot of things to do. I’m glad you and the others found time to be guests.
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Nothing much to tell really; just a bunch of strong-willed opinionated Germans, a few of whom leave the family in anger.
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My family tree is hard to put on paper, too – I could use your help, Beth-Ann. I don’t think there’s anyone who can claim to be their own grandparent, but my sister is her own aunt, sort of. My father was married three times, and my sister and I had half-siblings that were much older than we were. My sister married our half-brother’s second wife’s son from her first marriage.
I had an aunt who had a daughter out of wedlock and the daughter’s story was similar to Crow Girl’s – she was adopted by relatives. She wasn’t told the truth about who her mother was until she was an adult, and she was very upset about it and refused to speak to my aunt (her birth mother).
A different unmarried aunt had a son, but chose to keep him. This was in the early to mid-50’s and it was an unusual choice for a woman to make then. She never married and has had kind of a tough life.
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I have already told you about the founding aunt who defended herself during the witch trials…(one of) the other colorful aunts is from the other side of the family, my mom’s. Great Aunt Lillian was a nurse by trade. She never married, and she traveled a lot. One of her first jobs out of nursing school was at a southern finishing school for girls. She lasted a year. Rumor had it that she was asked to leave, having been a little too, ahem, friendly with the headmaster. She went on to join the army as a nurse in WWII – told the recruiter she would join up, but only if the sent her “where she could really help the boys.” She wasn’t on the front lines, but was in North Africa and then followed after the army as it moved through Italy and into France – as I recall she was in a field hospital unit (one step back from the MASH units). After that she came back to the states and lived various places and had various jobs, and would float in for visits, sometimes to take care of her sister (who now would be diagnosed with depression – then it was simply that she “took to her bed” for weeks and sometimes months). My aunt mostly remembers a stylish woman with fabulous shoes…wholly un-Lutheran shoes. After my grandmother died (the quiet yet feisty grandma I wrote about earlier), we found boxes and boxes of slides that had been Lillian’s. As we sat and looked at them we realized that there were many many snapshots of her with various good looking men. Hmm. She never married. Many good looking men. Hmm….we started making up stories since we didn’t know the true ones – but it may have gone a long way to explain why Lillian never married. 😉
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Was Carlos in the bunch?
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And then there’s my brother, Tom. My brothers, Tim and Tom, are identical twins. Tom is the left-handed one. In his youth, he was known to break several laws. Not civil or criminal laws. No, Tom broke laws of physics, chemistry, and averages.
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Taking off for the day.
Thanks to all the guest bloggers, which were so good: BiR, Renee, Ben, BiB and Ben again. I suspect it would be good if Dale’s reserve supply were restocked, don’t you think, for his sake, to keep this going, and for the quality of the submissions.
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My reading this morning is too fragmented to actually follow some of the complicated family trees you have all told of, but I get the jist.
My own family are of the type Clyde has described and we strive for normalacy above all–however–
I’ve been doing some genealogical digging. Most of what I am finding is just stuff that backs up the oral tradition as I have it from my grandparents when I had a school project in 7th grade-it is kind of gratifying to know just how accurate their stories were by reading about them in print.
A lot of the Minnesota counties have a way to search through the local papers online. You plug in a last name, and all the articles with that name in them show up on a dandy spread sheet and you can then go to the MHS library (which I hope is open again, and surely will be in a couple of weeks when I have some time off and can go digging) and look up the article on microfilm.
Most of what I have thus far found are the usual and very helpful obits and wedding write-ups (I love wedding write-ups, I confess).
Then there is the article which unambiguously states that one of my great-grandfathers and his son, my great-uncle were arrested for theft. I found the article, and it would have to be a huge coincidence if these were in fact NOT my relatives, but on the other hand, there are a couple of things in the article that don’t quite match up–further research is needed.
I have not mentioned this to my mother because a) it might not be news to her and b) as my brother always says, why ruin her day. I’m on my own on this little quest-I’ll let you know if I find out more.
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How do you find the search on the county web sites? Does Ramsey County have it?
With all the divorces and multiple marriages in my family, I suspect it would be interesting to figure out the actual timelines and when the children were born. Your parents don’t tell you everything. Believe me, i know.
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Linda, in Iowa and several other states, you go to the state web site, look for genealogy, then start burrowing down the menus until you reach a county genealogy web page for the county in which you have an interest. When I researched my family, I made contact with a genial secretary who said she would try to collect some relevant material for me. She ended up sending me about 200 pages of photocopied documents. My dad and I sent her a check, although she had done this out of the sheer love of it.
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There are a few good stories hidden among all the dullness that characterize my family tree. On my dad’s side of the family was a family called Simmons. When America entered WWI, several Simmons boys were quick to enroll. One of them–James, I think–volunteered for duty the first day it was legal to join the war. He served his time in Europe but never wrote home.
One day, about two months after the end of WWI, James showed up at his own front door. His wife, Alma, met him at the door.
“Oh, God,” said Frank, looking at Alma, “it all comes back to me. I remember now why I ran off to war.” He turned around and walked out of sight. There are rumors he ended up somewhere in California. Nobody knows.
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Wow. Blunt.
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oh gosh! i forgot my most interesting relative!!!! Uncle Roy (Orbison)!
he became my Uncle some time ago, i don’t remember when. about the same time that i decided i was half Navajo. i think i was hoping for some excitement in the family (other than overnight cakes) and decided i must be adopted (i know, it’s so common) and that Roy Orbison was, well, my Uncle. as far as i know he has not denied it. so there.
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and, he never will (since he’s dead now)
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I think Roy was also my Uncle. I guess you and I must be related, Barb.
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Well, I have a cousin in the Rodeo Hall of Fame, Dale Smith, for calf roping. And he is still alive.
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I’m sure I must have a cousin who is in the hall of fame for bull riding. I can’t remember his name and I’m not sure if he is still alive Is it possible that my Uncle Roy had a son who was a champion bull rider?.
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welcome to the Orbison family, Jim! maybe someday we’ll hold a seance and Roy will come sing to us again. what would he sing? In Dreams? Leah? It’s Over? Dream Baby? i wonder what he’s choose?
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he’d choose. only had half a Shandy so can’t claim drunkenness.
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The one that I always remember of his is Preaty Woman, but he could sing whatever he wishes. There is no one that sings like Roy. I think I might have had a little more than my usual amount of wine tonight, but i think I’m still fairly sober, right?.
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Thanks everyone for the stories today.
Like the man says ‘Everyone has a story’ so none of you should be afraid to contribute guest blogs. Just write something out just like you do here. I don’t want to speak for Dale but I bet he’d help you out if you felt like it needed it. He’s never been afraid to tell me what my stories need to be printable.
My Mom’s side of the family is pretty well documented back to the Great Grandparents coming over from Europe. And my wife’s Uncle’s Mother could trace her family back to the Mayflower.
My Dad’s side of the family is more vague.
It’s interesting; my Grandpa Hain was the only boy with 7 sisters. My Grandpa Eggler was one of 2 boys with 8 sisters and then my Dad was one of 5 boys.
Regarding my Uncle Carl from the story above… the step daughter, Maureen and I talk on Facebook. She saw the pictures of my Grandpa from a few days ago and as we talked about him she said she called him ‘Uncle Carl’ since my Grandma was her Dad’s sister and therefore ‘Aunt Helen’ …… so he was sort of Step Grandpa and Uncle Carl at the same time.
When I commented on that to her she said, ‘Yeah; it was difficult to explain’…. there’s an understatement!
Thanks everyone!
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crazy uncle randy was an nlaw foer a while and is now my two oldest kids crazy ncle randy for life. randy was an odd kid who grew up without a lot of friends but was studious about areas of interest like baseball statistics and current events from the newspaper. he would speak his thoughts o these matters in a very loud voice and to no one in particular at the moments it struck him appropriate. he lived upstairs at his parents house and came down only to refill his coffee cup with more of whatever the concoction was he chose to put in there at the moment. kind of like john muir always walking around with his cu which held soup, coffee potato chunks of hamburger or whatever he felt like eating. when i met him he was in his late twenties and was in a funk that the u of w eauclaire had turned down his request for prelaw and he began withdrawn feeling like a misfit and now forty years later it is obvious that the university of wisconsin and uncle randy were both right. he would not have made a god lawyer and he is a bit of a misfit. he is perfectly happy living in moms attic and comes down only to refill the cup. his substitute teaching jobs have stopped calling and his summer job of dressing up like a pioneer and sitting in one of the wisconsin historic sites at a historic park are all he has left. before randys father\died uncle randys dad told my kids never to be alone in the room with randy because he wasn’t right and there is no telling what he may do.. not the guy i would want coming down from my attic to fill his cup and fiddle with the microwave at odd hour of the day and night.
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