A while back, a cousin asked me if the family relationship in that old Ray Stevens song “I’m My Own Grandpa” was really possible. (Thanks, Suzanne, for helping me use up a bunch of minutes and a lot of Expo marker on a white board chasing it all down!)
Of course, songwriters Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe knew their business: that guy COULD be called his own grandfather, by the time you got through all those births and marriages. But it wasn't the equivalent of a brand-new viral video, back when it came out in 1947: the song, per Wikipedia, was once a “news” piece originally posted in 1822 in the Republican Chronicle of Ithaca, NY--which may have copied the story from an even earlier item in the London Literary Gazette.
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[And we scratch our heads today when our social media accounts are hacked or spoofed, and ask, “Why don’t these people find something to do?” Turns out that for at least 200 years, folks have wasted time figuring out twisted genealogies. Ah, those lovely days before smart phones.]
Which leads me to another question raised a few months back about where a recently-deceased relative fit into the family tree. The person who asked me knew he belonged somewhere; but, how close? Who were his parents and grandparents?
This made me really sad and even a little anxious. Time passes, and we lose track of each other. My daughters have cousins they wouldn’t recognize from Adam—to put it the old way.
And there’s another issue: at least two generations could’ve fit into the span of Sam and Maggie Alawine’s group of children—actually, you could say two generations WERE there, since their oldest daughter Ila was born in 1897 and the youngest, Omera, in 1924, a stretch of 27 years! By age, Omera could’ve easily been Ila’s own child, and the same was true of the last five children Maggie had. So I hardly knew any of my oldest relatives.
And it's ALSO true of my own family: my oldest brother could’ve been my father.
It made me realize we don’t really know that much about our second cousins, and even less about THEIR children. So this post is to help fill in information, and I want everybody to help, as much as you can, with details about your own families. Look over this chart, which shows the children of Sam and Maggie and their descendants. And be sure to look at the notes at the very bottom of the last section.
