My friend Dottie is a dedicated genealogist who suscribes to Ancestry.com and some other sites and has traced her ancestry back to the 1700's. Last night I phoned her while she was looking up info on one of those sites. I mentioned the photos of great great grandparents "Kitty and Samuel", and said I wished I knew something about them.

Dottie pulls them up on her computer and according to census records from the time, Kitty was not her real name--it was a nickname. Great great granny's real name was Eulala. I had never heard that name mentioned before. Then I asked about a great great aunt "Patience," whom no one seemed to know anything about. These computer searches pull the dead back to life with cold hard facts from census records, and other info other genealogist have found and added to the site.

Turns out great great aunt Patience had had a child out of wedlock and given the child to her mother to raise as hers so the infant wouldn't be called a bastard. Her mother was past childbearing age, but that baby boy was hers and nobody ever said any different. Patience died young--there are no photos of her extant.

Then Dottie pulled up a relative I remember seeing when I was a child, "Aunt Fanny." Fanny had a child out of wedlock and told everyone its father was a traveling salesman, with a last name I had never heard of. But she raised the child bearing her maiden name. Dottie says "Teenagers today think they invented sex, but there's always been a lot of 'undercover' activity going on. People back then just tried to hide it, deny it and squelch it."

I remember when I was a home health nurse, and an elderly patient of mine was delusional with dementia. She kept pleading for someone to get the baby out of the lake. Someone close to the family told me she had had a baby when she was a teenager, and her father had drowned the infant in a lake. He was an important man and didn't want the scandal. She never had another child. I felt such pity for her. Up until this latest generation, an unmarried woman having a baby was the blackest sin of all. (Kind of like Hester Prynne forced to wear the letter "A" in the Scarlet Letter.)

Who said "There's nothing new under the sun," and it's true. The same human hurts and rashness and pain have always been the same, and the genealogist searches fleshes out the people who were only names and numbers. Who would have known.

susil