FAMILY TALES

Searching for Connections on My Family Tree

I still haven’t found what I was looking for

My Father as a boy, his sister (my Auntie Ollie) and Mother (my grandmother) — family archives — Darren Weir

As I pored over the family tree my excitement was building. When I uncovered each new branch of the massive tree of names and dates, I knew I was revealing my family’s history — generation after generation.

When I got down to our branch I started to recognize the names. My grandparents and my aunts and uncles.

And then there was my father — the man who abandoned our family when I was two and my sisters were in their mid-teens. It was traumatic for us and upsetting for his mother and siblings.

But there was no evidence of any of that here.

There was nothing about the woman he married in Seattle, becoming a fugitive because he committed bigamy, among his other crimes. There was no mention of the new family he created just one province away from us — a wife, her two daughters, and their son, my half-brother.

There was no suggestion of any of that.

It’s not like there were any lies written about our family — there was just no mention of us at all. There was only my father’s name and next to him my mother’s name — no date of marriage or the names of their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren —…