The YA book I am just now outlining includes a couple of genealogical mysteries that are taken directly from my own life. One of them involves the young girl in this picture, my great grandmother Julia.

We are fairly certain the people in this picture are Julia, her mother Maria, her stepfather Rudolph and her first half sister, Carol. (I think it's Carol - I have to check again to see which one of the three younger girls is oldest.) The reason we don't know for sure who these people are is that somehow this photo ended up separated from the family albums and the first time my mother and I saw it was last year - ten years after my grandmother's death (and she would have known in a second if this was her mother). The old family albums are with my last surviving great aunt in Utah and no one has been through them in years. I hope someday to have access to them but until then, this is the oldest picture we have and my mother (who knew "Nana" very well) is pretty darn sure who we are looking at.

When all else fails in these matters I totally trust my mother.

The mystery is about Julia's father who nobody knows a single thing about and honestly we pretty much never will. The fact that she was illegitimate was never a question in our family and I assume that Rudolph knew this when he married Maria as I have their marriage license and it does not list her as a widow. I guess he was okay with it although he is mystery number 2 - Rudolph disappeared sometime in the next fifteen years and no member of my grandmother's family ever spoke of him. He is not buried with Maria (I know where she is). He just vanished.

One starts to wonder about Maria and men about now.

Julia grew up to be a beautiful woman and she married a gorgeous Irishman named Tom and they had eight children and from their early pictures together should have been happily ever after but weren't because my great grandfather - who everyone loved - drank himself to an early grave as Irishmen did in those days and was buried at 43. By then Julia was no longer beautiful and indeed had become a very hard woman. My memories of her are quite faint (she died when I was four) but I do recall a tiny lady in a room at my grandmother's house who loved seashells and sat up all night with my mother and me once when a tornado ripped down the street in front of the house. (I'm not making this up.) What kills me (and my mother) is that even though she lived with my grandmother for years they never talked about history or where she really came from or what the heck happened to her stepfather. This sort of thing drives me insane when I dwell on it, so in a way the book is a chance to exorcise all the demons of not knowing. Julia's transformation is so staggering - it's amazing to see her pictures - that I find her someone I wish, really really wish, I knew more about. I think my grandmother wished that too but never really said so; it just wasn't something you were supposed to think about back then.

Julia sure was a cute kid wasn't she? Expect a lot more pictures to come.

[Rudolph, Maria, Julia and Carol, circa 1894 in NYC.]