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I was musing today about a family reunion of 40 years ago, and my cousin Lily. (Lily's mother had named her daughters after flowers--there was Lily, Rose, Violet and Pansy.) At this certain reunion, Lily introduced her third husband--which was scandalous to everybody.
Lily's husband Arthur was a personable sort of guy, but an outsider from the get go because he had some sort of northern accent. Arthur was into tracing his family tree, and eager to talk about it. Genealogy was unheard of then, at least in our social class, not a popular undertaking like it is now. Arthur had a notebook and a scrapbook where he stored info, along with a few photos and documents.
Quirky people interest me, so I sat down with Arthur and looked at his collection. He was all excited because in his family history there was a legend that an ancestor had worked for the King before coming to America. I got Lily's address and on rare occasions we exchanged letters. She said Arthur had saved up and took a trip to England to do family research.
I didn't hear from her for about a year. Then she wrote a long sorrowful letter that Arthur had found out about his ancestors. His great great great (there might have been one more great in there somewhere, I don't remember) grandfather had been in the poorhouse, always been in danger of gaol from pickpocketing, had been press ganged into the Navy and escaped after two years. He worked at the King's Inn tavern as a hired tough, wielding a club to keep peace with rowdy sailors, absconded with funds and split for America, leaving a wife and six children behind.
So where was Arthur? He was in prison. He had embezzled funds from his workplace. Lily wrote "It took a while, but obviously, the apple didn't fall far from the tree."
It's kinda scary, isn't it, that character could be programmed into our genes?       susil
