The only thing he could tell me was that after my grandmother died my grandfather left Pennsylvania for North Carolina, where he stayed for months. He made the trip alone, and what my grandfather did on his trip is also lost to history.
The only thing my mom could tell me was that she had no recollection of that trip. And that I shouldn't have anointed Ximena Ximena because it sounds like eczema.
Well, I was soon unwittingly enlightened. OK. Maybe not unwittingly. But my suspicion that I just didn't want to know about PopEna (their celebrity couple name) was brutally confirmed when Cousin K rather enthusiastically divulged the tabloid-worthy genesis of the Ximena saga.
If you've made it through the full scope of Jon Snow's parentage, this story just may be your new obsession.
I was at The Crabbiest - I have completely given up; if the computer wants to call The Crabfest The Crabbiest, I'm done correcting it - when Cousin K - CK, because I'm too traumatized to write out "Cousin K" for a full post - offered to explain PopEna.
First, CK explained PopEna to my dad. She wanted his permssion, you see. To tell me. Well, my dad's only rule is that no one comes crying to him when they get into something they shouldn't. He had no problem with CK schooling me.
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| My dad didn't even cry when he was a baby. He sure as hell doesn't want to listen to you cry. |
PopEna had indeed been romantic. And Ximena was a dwarf.
I mean, I just can't with this story. I can't imagine that carnival life was kind to an early twentieth century dwarf. I also can't imagine my Pop-Pop getting it on as a single dude in the carnival. But CK should know of what she speaks; Ximena was her mother.
Ximena the namesake, not Ximena the dwarf.
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| Hmm...is there more to PopEna? |
CK probably should have stopped there. I wish CK had stopped there. But CK knows how my grandparents met. She offered to tell me, and I was curious. So curious. After all, my grandfather was a native of Indiana, while my grandmother was a citizen of Norfolk. My theory had been that the carnival had taken Pop-Pop to Virginia, where he'd met my grandmother. I was thinking love at first sight.
It wasn't love at first sight.
It was lust at first sight. Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop did the nasty. Just one time. But that one-nighter was enough to spawn my Uncle Junior and a shotgun wedding.
Oh no, no, no, no, NO!
My grandparents, born at the turn of the century, long storied to me as a conservative Southron-Midwestener marriage of over four decades, had a one night stand and made a baby? I'm still not allowed to have a one night stand or make a baby and I live almost one hundred years after their heyday.
Beck would probably tell me I'm insane to complain and not to believe everything that I breathe. Well, I'm going to complain, but I'll go along with the disbelief. I refuse to blindly accept any family story at face value and we're going to talk about why.
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| Oh Mom-Mom, you didn't. Did you? |
But first, the shotgun wedding. My parents were just as skeptical as I was. At their urging, I accessed the records I had amassed on ancestry.com. Ancestry has proven many a family legend wrong. I was hoping she - not sure why she's a she, but that's just how this is going to go - would prove my grandparents' chastity.
Wrong. So wrong. I was able to confirm that Uncle Junior was born in 1926, but I could find no marriage record for my grandparents. Was it a clerical error, or was it something more dramatic? Had my grandparents never been married at all? Were they the Brangelina of their day - six kids and no wedding?*
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| You guys have been to a wedding before....right? |
My distress is well founded. Ancestry has disspelled so much of what I thought to be true. About my family. About myself. I was always told I am equal parts Dutch and English, as are my parents. But when I delved into the Ancestry version of my lineage, I found that my dad is 100% English. Moreover, my mom isn't Dutch. At all. She is Pennsylvania Dutch, which is German, which basically explains why I'm a control freak, but fails to explain the rest of my family.
It does makes sense that we're so very English, though. None of us can cook anything with any flavor - should we talk about gurdy meat? - and my orthodontist bought a boat with the money he made off my teeth.
Another family legend is that no one knows the origins of our surname. My father's ancestors were New Englanders. One day, they and a group of their - what, cronies? Contemporaries? Puritanical devotees? - had been crossing a frozen river or lake. The ice gave way, killing my whole family, except for the toddler they'd brought on their icy trek. Because it's always a good idea to cross a frozen body of water with a child.
Apparently nobody knew my family's name, and therefore didn't know the baby's name. So they gave him the designation of Pope-pourri and moved on with their day.
Hmm...someone in my family doing something as nutty as crossing a frozen lake with a baby, and not saying a word to anyone with whom they travel? That totally sounds like them. I absolutely believed that story. And why wouldn't I? That's a rockin' cool ass story.
Unfortunately, it's also a mythical cool ass story. My dad's family goes back to 1340's England with our surname intact. They left England for Plymouth Rock, their ship landing there just three years after the Mayflower. They married into a prominent family, which sadly did none of us descendants any good.
No fractured ice. No mystery baby. Who were these affluent upstarts that risked all to start life anew in an unknown land? I was much more comfortable with the mute ice road trekkers.
So much misinformation. I was told I am related to Alexander Pope (false), a direct descendant of General John Pope (nope), the many times great great-something of James Pumphrey (not sure, but I let that one go because I like having a connection to Lincoln, no matter how tenuous or nefarious).
The truth about my grandmother's chocolate chip cookie recipe is just too painful to relate. If I keep digging, what other falsehoods threaten to surface? Am I really related to a pirate, or is that another inaccuracy? Did I indeed descend from Queen Elizabeth's chambermaid? Was my great-grandmother actually lashed to the mast of her father's ship during storms? Did he even have a ship? Did my ancestor - a knighted Brit serving as mayor to Hong Kong - really abscond with the city's treasury, never to be seen again?
The answer to that last one is no, on so many levels. He was governor - not mayor - and he never touched the treasury. Are we related? That answer awaits me in Ancestry's most factual annals.
At least I am a site better than Ximena The Namesake's grandson, who only knows his grandmother by the first name his grandfather always used and therefore thought all the Ximena The Namesake stories were about soemone else.
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| Who is this girl really? |
I feel like, today, I know more about who I am not than who I am. I'd bemoan my loss to my parents, but my dad has that don't-come-crying-to-me rule and my mom will only try - again - to make me see that the tea cup eye drop holder is a good idea.
Today, I related to Husband that I noticed my mom had a book from a library we never attended growing up in my parents' house. Our town lies in two townships. Had the library authorities caught up with my parents? Had my parents erroneously and criminally directed us to the wrong library all those years?
A terrible thought occurred to me. What if my childhood town isn't in the township I was rasied to believe it occupied? Had I gone to the wrong schools? Used the wrong zip code? Joined the wrong swim club?
I mean, probably.
The Binge
Stranger Things on Netflix (yes, the Winona Ryder show) is a healthy mix of The Goonies, E.T., Project X, and maybe a little bit of WarGames and Ready Player One. Set in the 1980's, it is equal parts nostalgia and science fiction thriller. You'll want to binge it. You should indulge that desire. Luke Cage starts on Netflix soon. You want to have time for that, don't you?
Also, if you haven't tapped into The West Wing Weekly yet, get moving. This week Otter was interviewed. The show is on hiatus next week, but the following week showrunner Tommy Schlamme and the underrated Bradley Whitford stop by to reminisce. Yay!
* Further extensive research indicates my grandparents were, in fact, married long before Uncle Junior came along. A respectably long time.
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