Family--it's Complicated!

Family--it's Complicated!

What an understatement.

In a sense what your forebears did was not about you--at least in part--it was about them. In another sense--it's all about you.

The unraveling of relationships is life's work.

Some of you may know I've recorded part of a short story called "Lou's Homecoming" for WLRH. It involves the death of my father and half-brother Lou some 20 years ago. I did not even know of the existence of my half-brother until I was 38.

I had the mistaken impression since my dad didn't talk often about his family his dad died while he was very young.

My brother--very much the historian--related the following yesterday in an email:

Dad was born in Shenandoah, PA. His father Peter, an immigrant from Uzhgorod, Western Ukraine was born about 1872 and immigrated to the United States in the late 19th/early 20th century. 

Peter settled in Shenandoah where he married Anna who was an immigrant, interestingly enough, from a little town in Slovakia, just over the border from Western Ukraine. They had not met until Pennsylvania. Peter worked his entire life in the coal mines and died in 1935 during the year of Lou’s birth and my dad Steve was 23 years old.

Oops--We walk in the light afforded us.