exuse me my guy (gender neutral) you cannot put those tags on the family lore post like that friend 0_0
Oh, my dude (gender neutral), where to even start...
My parents being distant cousins – so I don't really remember the details and I am too lazy to look in myheritage... My mother's hobby is trying to reconstruct the family tree as far as possible, I think she is now somewhere in 17th century. Anyway, some time between the Serfdom Patent of 1781 and WWI, one member of her father's family decided that they no longer like the mountains in the south of the country... and moved to the mountains at the north of the country, where they married one of my father's paternal ancestors. It was far enough in the past for my geneticist to say it plays no role, but I like to say that it explains a lot about me and my siblings. I also would like to stress that the families are of different ethinicities. To make it funnier, infamously, at my parents' wedding in 1980s, my maternal grandfather had one too many, and started to trashtalk Germans, which my paternal grandfather kind of waved off as him being drunk, but it really upset my paternal grandmother, which in turn upset my slightly drunk father. So my parents ended up sitting in the front of the venue, my mother, four months pregnant and sober, comforting my sobbing, drunk father, as he hiccupped "but you knew we were Germans before we got married". If I had a TARDIS, I would go to that wedding, walk into the room, and say "well, you know you guys are all related so the ethnicity stuff is bullshit, right?"
My great-grandmother who died in botched abortion – in the year 1935, when my paternal grandmother was 3 years old and her sister a couple of years older, their parents found out that they are expecting a child. At that time, abortion was illegal in Czechoslovakia, based on the 1852 Austrian-Hungarian law, and both the person asking for the abortion, and the abortionist were facing charges. But the couple found themselves in trouble – they were already struggling to make ends meet with two children, and they for sure didn't have money for a "safe" abortion. They decided to help themselves, with a piece of wire. Unfortunately, my great-grandfather punctured the uterine wall and my great-grandmother died before they could get help. He went to prison charged with an illegal abortion and manslaughter. My grandmother only remembered "living with their mean aunt before the war". My great-grandfather became a staunch communist as a result, even when the regime turned sour, because he believed that if there was a communist rule in the 1930s, he would have had enough money to support another child. I am personally a firm believer in free contraceptives and safe, legal abortion for everyone who pursues it, no questions asked; and in that there is enough resources for everyone to live comfortably without struggling on a full-time income and we should make sure that happens.
My father's bloodline being mostly single mothers – well, as seen above, my father comes from a long line of piss-poor people. No one really cares if some peasant girl in the mountains gets in trouble. Sometimes they managed to get married later to a widower or sometimes someone would come forward and claim the child nad the mother. Mostly not. This exploration in the past open my mother's eyes in regards of her belief that people in the past didn't fuck before marriage. I think she read one too many Jane Austen novels.
The Brazilian side of the family – once upon a time, when he was 18, my great-uncle told his mom he’s going to the dance at the one village over. He disappeared and wrote a letter weeks later from a refugee camp in the what was the American sector of Germany after WWII. Some time later, he moved to Brazil. No one knew why. He was the second oldest child and the oldest son, and he stayed in touch with the brother who was closest in the age to him, and who died in 1988. Then no one was ever in touch with him again. There is a Christmas postcard from the 1990s in the documents that belong to my grandparents, where he apologised for his bad Czech and asked about the family. I think no one ever replied to it. Enter the internet and me being a busybody. I found in the immigration records online the scan of his arrival card from Rio de Janeiro. I was sitting at work one day around 2015 and read about the growing number of Facebook users in the world. I have tried before, but I decided to take an advantage of that and basically spammed that jpeg and message in English/google translated Portuguese to everyone in Brazil with the same surname. Eventually, a woman got back to me with google translated message that it’s her late father-in-law. Then she put me in touch with her daughter, who spoke English. So we exchanged some stories, I helped them identify people in the photos they had etc., we still follow each other on IG. They didn’t know why he left the country either. All we had was some vague story that his godmother told people about unhappy love but it didn’t track and people said she was making it up to be important. Enter me being bored at work in 2019. I was browsing archives and found actual report of his intake interview in the refugee camp the US army officer made. So we found out that he was working in Skoda and didn’t like the way the communist management was treating the employees and was very vocal about it. He was member of democratic organisations that were in opposition to the communists. And then they threatened him with prison and his family getting in trouble, his siblings being kicked out of schools… and they told him to get his affairs in order because they will come arrest him after the weekend. So he went home for the weekend and during it, left for Bavaria (not so far across the mountains). It was tactic used to made the “undesirable elements” leave the country.
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