[ExI] 1950 census, was: RE: tennis

Tue May 17 20:55:12 UTC 2022

From: Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> 
Subject: Re: [ExI] 1950 census, was: RE: tennis

On Tue, May 17, 2022, 11:55 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

If you ponder the father = great grandfather dilemma, I have an even thornier one for you, also related to DNA genealogy.

>…I don't understand why that's any dilemma other than cultural taboo….I ask a lot of questions…

In the part of the country where this took place, cultural taboos are taken very seriously, but it gets worse.  The man who married his own granddaughter didn’t realize she was a blood relative.  His own son denied having gone into the back country sowing his wild oats, so he didn’t know.  The old man sired two with his granddaughter, the local church ladies either knew or suspected, they went back there unbeknownst, saw the wretched condition of the teenage mother and her two children, realized the babies would both probably die.  So… they did something which isn’t in any of the records: they stole the baby, put her up for adoption.  We don’t know how that was done, if they got the mother stoned or what happened, and no one is talking.  The other child was age about 2 years.  They left him behind.  The old man divorced his fourth wife, went up and married the teenage girl who now had just the one child.  Together they had five more.

I learned of all this from my cousin’s elderly niece.  Ja that sounds like a contraction in terms, but the niece was 26 years the senior to her aunt.  She told me the whole story of the man who owned two square miles of property where there were squatters living since the long time agos, who married five times and had children whose ages spanned 55 years.  

The elderly niece knew the younger baby had disappeared and no one knew what had become of the missing child, didn’t even know if she had survived, until DNA genealogy came along.  Between us we figured it out.

Ethical dilemma bigtime: do I tell my cousin the circumstances of her birth and that she was stolen?

Answer: no.  I might do that to my brother as a joke, but I would not do that to an innocent person.  I don’t know what psychological impact that would have.  So… I didn’t.

I did introduce my cousin to her elderly niece and decided to step out of that loop entirely.  I don’t know what they told her and what they didn’t tell her, but my cousin was adopted outside the area and had a good life.  Her six siblings did not.

Mike, what would you do in that situation please?

spike 

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