Family found: a true story
Posted on April 30, 2005
Filed Under Life
I’ve been meaning to blog this all week, but it’s been hard to find the right words…
My father died of colorectal cancer on February 10, 1999. A few days later, I put together a [memorial section on my website.](http://www.momathome.com/misc/memorial/index.html) My father loved the Internet, and it was cathartic for me to compose the site. It’s what I [wrote for his funeral](http://www.momathome.com/misc/memorial/eulogy.html), [his old website exactly as he last left it](http://www.momathome.com/misc/memorial/shellyw/welcome.htm) and his [obituary](http://www.momathome.com/misc/memorial/obituary.html) that ran in the local newspaper. I don’t care how many different websites I design for myself, these pages will carry from site to site and I’ll never change a comma.
My father had a brother who was much older than him. When my father was a child, his older brother was already an adult and living his own life. My father thought his brother walked on water. While my father lived with his parents who were very traditional and my father was a “good boy” my uncle travelled and was a free thinker. Through the rough times of my father’s life, he often said it was his brother that helped hold him together.
My uncle died of multiple sclerosis in 1972. I was only 6 years old at the time, and my memories of my uncle are sketchy at best. I have one clear memory of him…at a Passover seder when he was already sick, standing up from the table. He was tall. Very tall. In my memory he was so tall that he had to duck down or his head would hit the ceiling. My mother says I probably remember him hunched over from the disease. But even now, over 30 years later I can “see” him standing up from the table and cocking his head to the side so he wouldn’t bump the ceiling. Like a giant in a doll’s house. After my uncle died, I remember hearing whispers about things about him, but nothing specific.
A few days ago, I received an email. I’ve taken out some private details:
I hope you don’t find this request/project offensive?
I recently visited your father’s memorial site
My original name was Weiler. My mother married a {uncle’s name} in 1945 in {place}. His home address is given as {address} and that his father’s name was Aaron. He was a corporal in the US Army at the time of the marriage and also the marriage certificate states that he was a medical student aged 25. Other information I have regarding my father is that he was of Austrian Jewish extraction…
Are we related? I know many people have the surname Weiler
I had a hunch. I called my mother to confirm. I read her the email over the phone. I finished the first sentence and my mother said, “Oh my God, you found your uncle’s lost child!” The address in the email was my father’s address as a child and all the dates and names matched. It seems that while my uncle was in the Army in Europe he met this man’s mother, they had a child and married (in that order). I have no idea what happened, but for whatever reason my uncle returned to the United States the same year. This man’s mother remarried 10 years later and he took his stepfather’s name. Any family members reading this correct me if I’m wrong, but our family knew from my uncle’s divorce papers that there was a child, but with the name changes there was no way of easily tracking him down.
So I replied, letting this man know that yes, he found his family. I am his first cousin. I forwarded his email to his brother and sister who have now been in contact with him. He lives in the UK, so a face-to-face meeting will have to wait for a while. He had been looking for his father’s family since his mother died in 1993. He had his birth certificate, but it wasn’t until recently that he thought to try and find his parent’s marriage certificate and it was that piece of paper that had his father’s address and his grandfather’s name. With that information, he Googled and found my father’s obituary on my website.
We just had a wonderful phone conversation, and he’ll be talking to his uncle (my father’s only surviving brother) and his brother and sister in the next few days as well. Thank goodness Vonage is only 0.03 cents a minute to UK as we were on the phone for nearly 2 hours. We talked about family, art & politics and through the entire conversation I felt my father’s presence in the room. My father’s side of the family is small and now I know there’s one more out there. He’s only 4 years younger than my father would have been today, and I think they would have been great friends. I even made sure that he had a recent colonoscopy, since now he knows that he’s at higher risk.
So when my mother said, “Oh my God, you found your uncle’s lost child” my answer to her was, “No, Daddy did.”
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That’s really a great story. Thanks for sharing it.