Thursday Tidbits: A Jaw-dropping Day

It’s been three weeks since I posted a Thursday Tidbit, but boy howdy, do I have a good one for y’all today. Yesterday was one crazy, happy day. I learned I have a niece! A niece I never knew existed. I found out about her from a cousin who connected with my niece’s husband on a genealogy research site. She found a message he posted — thirteen years ago! How’s that for astounding?

Let me back up, way back to the late 1930s when my father and his first wife split up. They lived on the west coast and had two very young children. The oldest child was a girl, the younger one a boy. For a while after the break-up, the children were apparently in some sort of foster care, then their mother took the girl with her to Alaska, where she was from. My dad took the infant boy to Texas and left him with his brother, my uncle. You see, Daddy was a traveling salesman who had no way of caring for a young child.

Eventually, my aunt and uncle adopted my half-brother, my father married my mother, they had me and we moved to Minnesota to be near Mama’s family. The years passed without any word of my half-sister. My dad tried once to locate her but had no luck, and my half-brother blamed him for letting his sister go. Now, both men are gone, never to know what became of that lost little girl.

Then, out of the blue I receive an email from a cousin who has been digging into our family genealogy for something like fifty years. And she drops this huge announcement in my lap: she has found my half-sister’s daughter! I am still in shock. Coincidentally, my niece and her husband have children and grandchildren living in the Fort Worth area, where I and my gang also live. I look forward to the day when we will all meet for a huge family reunion.

Just goes to show you never can tell when the universe will throw you a curve, a joyous one in my case.