by Paola Lizares
Home >> Genetic Reunions
It was my first trip to my country of origin in ten years. It was my husband’s first trip to the Philippines in his life, so it was the first time I introduced him to my mother’s mother and her family. And it was the first time I met most of my father’s relatives.
My parents separated when I was only two. Afterwards, I met my father just a couple of times, once when I was nine and once when I was nineteen. That time, when I was nineteen, he introduced me to two of my uncles and to four of my cousins. Six years later, when I was twenty-five, he passed away. But, thanks to the Internet, I was able to keep in touch with both uncles and to “meet� my father’s second wife. In this recent trip to the Philippines, I met her in person. Funny coincidence: her name is the same as my mother’s, and her father’s name is the same as my mother’s father’s name.
So, almost a month ago, for the very first time in my life, I met my stepmother, the rest of my father’s siblings and siblings-in-law, my cousins, the children of a cousin, my father’s cousins, the children of his cousins, his friends, and his dog. Of course, the sentence I heard most frequently during this trip was “You look like your dad.� Yes, I do look like him. And I look like the rest of the family, too. It’s something in the eyes, people say.
Have you ever met a relative for the first time in your adulthood? It could be the relative of a biological parent, as in my case, or it could be the relatives of a relative who emigrated long ago, as in the case of my stepfather’s family.
In the mid-nineties, I traveled with my mother and stepfather to Argentina. There, in Roque Pérez, a small town in the middle of the Humid Pampa, live the descendants of his granduncle, who ran away from the Basque Country at the beginning of the 20th century because he couldn’t stand his new stepmother. Aunt Alina and her siblings look just like my stepfather’s aunts at home in Tolosa and San Sebastián. Yet they are cowboys. They live in a rural environment, wear different clothes, and speak a different kind of Spanish.
We wouldn’t have known about our relatives in South America if it hadn’t been for a Zaragozan priest with an interest in genealogy who took the initiative to trace back their roots and bring the two branches back in touch.
There is another passionate story in my stepfather’s family, fit for an Isabel Allende novel. Long ago, a Basque woman went to Mexico on her own (a feat for that time), had an affair with a married man (yes, married!), and reared her son all by herself in the Basque Country (scandal!). This son, Uncle Josetxo, had one daughter and four sons. Years after the married man and his wife passed away, one of Uncle Josetxo’s’s sons went to Mexico on business and was brave enough to knock on the door of the house of his half-family. They welcomed him with open arms.
What about you? Have you ever met a long-lost relative?
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Posted on http://www.weeklyletter.com at 2007-11-29 09:00:00 +0100
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Hello everyone!
My country has traditionally been a land of emigration and so I think it’s safe to say that all Irish families have got some relatives living abroad. In fact, the population of Ireland dropped from over 7,000,000 in the early 1840s to just under 3,000,000 in the early 1970s. Most of this occurred from about 1830 to 1855 – the famine years – when nearly 2,000,000 refugees were forced to travel abroad in search of a better life – or just a life. Far more emigrated from the west of Ireland, where my people are from, than any other part. All of my mother’s siblings (and her mother) emigrated and most of my father’s family too. This means that I’ve got scores of relatives in the UK, the USA, Canada and Australia (countries to where the Irish, generally speaking, emigrated), most of whom I’ve never met. And that’s just in relation to those who emigrated one generation ago! Times have changed, though, and I am the only one of my immediate family (I’ve got three brothers and three sisters) who doesn’t live in Ireland.
Thanks for your comment, Joe. If I ever meet an O’Dowd here in Australia, I’ll check and see if he or she looks like you.
What does O’Dowd mean, anyway? Do you know the story behind your surname?
My family come from Sligo, like Joe’s, and, like Joe’s, has branches that reach out far beyond that beautiful county. I have American, English and African cousins.
The Irish diaspora can be calculated as 80,000,000 people although if you only count Irish citizens, like myself, who live outside of Ireland it numbers 3,000,000.
Two years ago twenty-two of my cousins visited me in Madrid for a family reunion. Many of these relations I hadn’t seen for more than thirty years. Within five minutes of being with them I knew that I was with family. There was a palpable sensation of ‘clan’.
We now have our own website forum where we keep in touch between reunions. Next year, we meet at my brother’s place in Skiathos. In common with many Irish gatherings there will be liquid entertainment and stories We will talk of the old ones, my mother’s generation, born at the same time as the Republic of Ireland itself. Talk of their lives, ambitions and adventures.
And we will sing. Just like every generation before us, we will sing with all our hearts for no other reason but that we can.
I would like to elaborate on the second story.
My husband’s maternal grandfather had a big brother who hated their new stepmother enough to board a ship headed for Argentina and settle in a hick town of the Pampas called Roque Pérez. He acquired a farm and ranch, married a local, had five children, and lived happily ever after.
Contact with his Basque relatives petered out and then he died and that was it… until about 1990, when a priest from Zaragoza traveled to South America and chanced upon this immigrant family that had only half-knowledge of its roots in “northern Spain.” The cleric took it upon himself to “play bridge” and in no time my mother-in-law had done the transatlantic journey and was knocking at the door of one of her lost first-degree cousins. The next year two of those cousins came to visit the land of their father.
In 1994, we flew to Buenos Aires to visit friends and of course also visit this family in Roque Pérez, which is still within the province of Buenos Aires. All of them were then already in their 60s and 70s, just like their cousins here in San Sebastian and Tolosa, whom they resembled remarkably despite the melodious tango accent and the country lifestyle. These grandaunts and granduncles of my son are gauchos! We stayed a day and a night studying photographs, exchanging stories, putting two and two together, sipping mate.
It’s great, Donal, that your family organizes family reunions. Are they meant to be every three years? Family reunions can be BO-RING (Dave surely knows how to say this just like Homer Simpson), but, if they are well organized and if people don’t just eat and drink but also talk, mingle with each other, play games, sing, dance, and listen to good music then they can actually be a lot of fun. It is also important to avoid talking about hot topics like politics and religion. That could make a family reunion bitter and sour.
Hi Paola,
what interesting stories!!! If I could trace back enough in time in my origins probably I would find lots of far relatives in other countries. The whole America is full of descendants of Spaniards. But when I ask my parents about that, they can only remember until their grand parents, which take us to the middle of the 19th century (one of my grand mothers, Angeles, was born in 1874 and the other, Micaela, was born in 1892) and all of them were here in Spain.
But we are a big family. I have 20 cousins and two of them live in the USA now. In fact, I think they are American citizens. They lived in a village near the US naval station in Rota, in the south of Spain and they got merried with American soldiers in the sixties and they moved to the US then. My cousin Victoria lives in San Diego and my cousin Laura lives in NY. I don’t meet them since 1977 when we made a family reunion in one of their vacations in Spain.
Another cousin of mine, Pedro Pablo, lived for several years in Australia in the mids 80’s, I don’t know why, but now he is living in the Canary Islands.
JC
So great to hear from you, JC! Your grandmother Micaela was born just four years before my great-grandmother Rosario.
You should go and visit your cousins in San Diego and in New York. Think of it as killing two birds with one stone: you get to see your relatives and you also get to practice your English. Or why not send your kids?
I enjoy family get-togethers but can’t say that I have ever had one with family that I didn’t know. Whenever I go back to the U.S., I try to get together with my dad’s family, who I don’t have very much contact with. That is about as close as I come to that type of meeting.
Soon my mother’s side of the family will have to start having family reunions, otherwise I may never see some of my cousins again!
I would like to talk about second-degree or second cousins. These are the children of my parents’ first cousins. I have more second cousins far away, on my mother’s side, than I have second cousins close by, on my father’s side. I also see the faraway ones more often than the nearby ones, and have more in common with them, including in looks. Some of them are a bit older than me, such as Camil who came to visit the other weekend. She is 19.
Wesley, I wonder if you saw some distant relatives of yours last year in Trarbach, Germany, without knowing it. Would it be too hard to find your German roots?