So you prompted me to call my mother and ask how Popeye was related to them, and apparently he’s my great-grat-grandmother’s first-husband’s cousin’s son.
The First Husband is the whole reason my mother’s family came to america in the first place apparently. in 1902, he decided he didn’t want to be father to 9 girls anymore, so he went out for a pint one night and fucked off to Chicago without actually divorcing GGG. For a few years she thought he’d been killed and dumped in the Thames (these things happened in Liverpool in the 1900′s) and shortly re-married, and Second Husband fathered two more daughters with her, including my Great-Grandmother.
In 1908, First Husband wrote from Chicago for money. This was a problem because despite fucking off to another continent, they were still married, and GGG was committing bigamy. Despite pleading her case before the courts that Really, Y’all gave me his death certificate when he didn’t turn up after a month, they fined her an outrageous amount of money and only commuted her prison sentence because “her brood would place undue stain on the orphanage”.
Second Husband, who was a halfway decent man that only beat her sometimes, suddenly dies of knife wound in a Pub fight, and GGG is left up shit creek with 10 girls and nobody willing to hire a bigamist maid. So GGG attempts to woo First Husband back to England. She goes so far as to pay a photographer to take Nudes of her to remind him what he left.
That was an exciting Christmas, going through an old album and finding THOSE.
Despite GGG’s heartfelt efforts and godlike booty, First Husband remained in the US, enjoying his new life of running credit scams and bootlegging.
After another 4 years of this nonsense, GGG gets the money to ferry herself and her brood across the atlantic to America, where they weren’t so uptight about the sex lives of domestic workers and she could probably get a job. The ALMOST come on the Titanic- we found the tickets next to the nudes- but at the last moment, Great-Aunt Liz catches the Measles, forcing everyone into quarantine and saving them from an icy death. They instead come on the next boat, and have to pick up the survivors of the Lusitania. Everyone gets lice and has to be shaved at Ellis Island.
Once in america, GGG finds out First Husband has died, For Realsies, please come identify his corpse and also he owes the state of Illinois like $500 in court fees so-
To which GGG goes “LOL, NO.” and moves to Cleveland with her Youngest daughter (my great-grandmother) and her new Russian husband, and takes over as manager of the local grocery store and leads a life of relative american-lower-middle-class comfort until her death in 1928 at age of 58.
…So you understand our confusion that GG knew of Popeye’s existence at all.
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