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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2Nf6OXn
so like. forever ago. Dude was thinking about his Latvian Heritage etc., and bought a book to teach himself the language. (his mother is a native speaker. i was like, ask her. he was like, uh no. and i thought that was ridic, and then i remembered how i asked my own mother, an expert knitter [like CRAZY EXPERT] if she would teach me how to knit, and she texted me back, no, emailed, literally sent me an entire email back with one word in it. ‘youtube’, she said. … my mother is a certified teacher with 30 years experience, and was like, no. So. ok. i get it. buy a book, bro. just. buy a book. Fine.)
anyway. he read up about his Heritage etc., and was like, well. Apart from literally anything else, if I want to go about learning more about Old Country, maybe getting citizenship or maybe not, literally whatever, but– Anyway. First things first, ask a particular bureau for the paperwork on his grandparents, who fled the country as refugees during the Soviet invasion immediately following WWII.
And then he forgot he did that. but last week, whatever this mysterious bureau was, after like, more than a year, they got back to him! and now he has his grandparents’ paperwork from when they fled the country as Displaced Persons.
This includes, like, if there was a list or manifest or whatever, it’s the first page of the manifest with all the header info, and then the page that his grandparents are on. Which means he knows that a particular Auntie and her family fled at the same time, but doesn’t have info on the woman whose house we live in because her last name started with an S so she’s on a later page, if at all, so we don’t know if she was in the same batch. (Probably.) (We can’t find out, though; she has no living descendants.)
So, I pointed out that he really, like really, with a quickness, needs to sit his mother and aunt down and get concrete answers, preferably recorded or immediately transcribed, to any questions he has. Aunt was alive; she was 5 when they fled, and 9 when they got to the US, which is fucking intense– that’s like, a whole bunch of her childhood that was spent in refugee camps, which I knew but didn’t know know.
She’s also old. I don’t think of her as old, because some of my first encounters with her entailed her doing things like chainsawing a tree down and such, but. She’s going deaf, and she’s, well. She might be 80. She’s not young. Her husband died of age-related complications. He was a Korean War vet. (He joined up because he thought we’d go fight Russia, which he hated. Aunt was not allowed to wear red, her whole marriage, because it was Russia’s color. [”And I’m an autumn!” She’s fucking hilarious.]
So like. Dude has not mentioned to his mother or aunt that he’s started researching this, but. I think it’s time, bro. I think you need to sit down with your aunt and turn on a camera. I think you need to find out what a displaced persons’ camp in Germany in 1946 was like. And shit like how his grandparents met. His grandmother’s name was not the name he’d known her as; legally, it was a longer form, and the paperwork disagrees on what it was. (He thought it was Anna; the paperwork variously claims Antonina, Antonie, and Antonia.) (Interestingly, his aunt’s super-uncommon can’t-be-spelled-by-Americans name appears twice more besides as hers, on the two pages of the manifest of 50ish refugees who presented themselves at the displaced persons’ camp at the same time. Clearly, it was a common name in Latvia in the 30s and 40s.)
He also now knows the names of his great-grandparents, which he’d never even heard before. (He is very possibly named after one. Hard to say. Ask your mom, bro.)
So this is my PSA to all of you: If you think you’ll ever want to know where your people come from, find the oldest living relative you have, clear out a goodly block of time, and ask them who the oldest relative they can remember was.
Other great details that you will not get from paperwork are things like, how did your parents meet? (Dude’s grandparents’ birthplaces are wildly disparate, in Latvian terms, so how on earth did they know one another well enough to marry? Grandpa was also a decade Grandma’s senior, was that normal?? ?? Probably! These things wind up super-vivid, though, and give you such a connection to what life was like in that time and place.) (People are and have always been just people, and it’s so much more interesting to understand how than to get a dry list of names and dates and places you haven’t been.)
And if Dude does this project, well– Aunt’s grandson recently got married and is the kind who’ll probably have kids, so in like, 20 years, Dude will absolutely be a hero if he gives them this insight into who their people were. I’m just saying that as someone who doesn’t know why her ancestors bothered immigrating to this shithole.
[my last immigrant was 1912 and i can’t imagine why. maybe i’m just worn down by all of this.] [the first one was 1620 and i know why but i really wish they hadn’t, those jerks.]
(Your picture was not posted)
so like. forever ago. Dude was thinking about his Latvian Heritage etc., and bought a book to teach himself the language. (his mother is a native speaker. i was like, ask her. he was like, uh no. and i thought that was ridic, and then i remembered how i asked my own mother, an expert knitter [like CRAZY EXPERT] if she would teach me how to knit, and she texted me back, no, emailed, literally sent me an entire email back with one word in it. ‘youtube’, she said. … my mother is a certified teacher with 30 years experience, and was like, no. So. ok. i get it. buy a book, bro. just. buy a book. Fine.)
anyway. he read up about his Heritage etc., and was like, well. Apart from literally anything else, if I want to go about learning more about Old Country, maybe getting citizenship or maybe not, literally whatever, but– Anyway. First things first, ask a particular bureau for the paperwork on his grandparents, who fled the country as refugees during the Soviet invasion immediately following WWII.
And then he forgot he did that. but last week, whatever this mysterious bureau was, after like, more than a year, they got back to him! and now he has his grandparents’ paperwork from when they fled the country as Displaced Persons.
This includes, like, if there was a list or manifest or whatever, it’s the first page of the manifest with all the header info, and then the page that his grandparents are on. Which means he knows that a particular Auntie and her family fled at the same time, but doesn’t have info on the woman whose house we live in because her last name started with an S so she’s on a later page, if at all, so we don’t know if she was in the same batch. (Probably.) (We can’t find out, though; she has no living descendants.)
So, I pointed out that he really, like really, with a quickness, needs to sit his mother and aunt down and get concrete answers, preferably recorded or immediately transcribed, to any questions he has. Aunt was alive; she was 5 when they fled, and 9 when they got to the US, which is fucking intense– that’s like, a whole bunch of her childhood that was spent in refugee camps, which I knew but didn’t know know.
She’s also old. I don’t think of her as old, because some of my first encounters with her entailed her doing things like chainsawing a tree down and such, but. She’s going deaf, and she’s, well. She might be 80. She’s not young. Her husband died of age-related complications. He was a Korean War vet. (He joined up because he thought we’d go fight Russia, which he hated. Aunt was not allowed to wear red, her whole marriage, because it was Russia’s color. [”And I’m an autumn!” She’s fucking hilarious.]
So like. Dude has not mentioned to his mother or aunt that he’s started researching this, but. I think it’s time, bro. I think you need to sit down with your aunt and turn on a camera. I think you need to find out what a displaced persons’ camp in Germany in 1946 was like. And shit like how his grandparents met. His grandmother’s name was not the name he’d known her as; legally, it was a longer form, and the paperwork disagrees on what it was. (He thought it was Anna; the paperwork variously claims Antonina, Antonie, and Antonia.) (Interestingly, his aunt’s super-uncommon can’t-be-spelled-by-Americans name appears twice more besides as hers, on the two pages of the manifest of 50ish refugees who presented themselves at the displaced persons’ camp at the same time. Clearly, it was a common name in Latvia in the 30s and 40s.)
He also now knows the names of his great-grandparents, which he’d never even heard before. (He is very possibly named after one. Hard to say. Ask your mom, bro.)
So this is my PSA to all of you: If you think you’ll ever want to know where your people come from, find the oldest living relative you have, clear out a goodly block of time, and ask them who the oldest relative they can remember was.
Other great details that you will not get from paperwork are things like, how did your parents meet? (Dude’s grandparents’ birthplaces are wildly disparate, in Latvian terms, so how on earth did they know one another well enough to marry? Grandpa was also a decade Grandma’s senior, was that normal?? ?? Probably! These things wind up super-vivid, though, and give you such a connection to what life was like in that time and place.) (People are and have always been just people, and it’s so much more interesting to understand how than to get a dry list of names and dates and places you haven’t been.)
And if Dude does this project, well– Aunt’s grandson recently got married and is the kind who’ll probably have kids, so in like, 20 years, Dude will absolutely be a hero if he gives them this insight into who their people were. I’m just saying that as someone who doesn’t know why her ancestors bothered immigrating to this shithole.
[my last immigrant was 1912 and i can’t imagine why. maybe i’m just worn down by all of this.] [the first one was 1620 and i know why but i really wish they hadn’t, those jerks.]
(Your picture was not posted)
