I’ve been playing on ancestry.com recently, looking up my ancestors, and I found a couple of interesting things to note:

• I’m about 12% Seminole Indian. However, my grandfather is listed as “mulatto,” and his mother is listed as “black.” You see, back in the day, especially in the South, if you weren’t white, you were, well, black. And yet, another thing to consider is during the Civil War, the Seminole Indians took in and protected many black families, so I imagine there’s quite a bit of a mix going on there
• I was able to trace my grandma’s family back to the 1600’s…all the way to Connecticut. After that the trail gets cold. I imagine that was when they immigrated from England.
• I’m related to Jane Austen, Bill Clinton, and Isaac Newton!
• I’m stuck on my great-grandfather “Frank Schwenk” born in 1861 on my dad’s side. He’s supposed to have been born in Pennsylvania and moved to Portland, Maine, but unfortunately I can’t find anything. Another piece of info to note: one one census record it lists both his parents as being born in Germany…so that might be why the trail went cold there. But another lists them both having been from Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, incidentally has the largets population of Schwenks in the US by far.

All of this research got me to decide to reconnect with my mother again, if for nothing else but to get more info on our relatives so that maybe I can expand the search. Unfortunately, when I called she wasn’t there. I spoke with my Aunt Faye, a woman I hadn’t talked to in over 25 years, for quite a while. She told me my mother is working two jobs to make ends meet. My sister is still married to Glen, who’s been abusing her pretty badly.
I know this sounds awful, but there’s just a part of me that doesn’t want to get involved with any of that. My family pretty much all the way back has been rather poor and, well, fucked up, is the best way to put it. I’m trying to break myself from that pattern, which is probably why I obsess so much on my career and my “success.” I just don’t want to end up like my mother, living with her sister in the middle of some tiny town in Georgia, working two jobs to make ends meet…all alone, with no savings or retirement to speak of. It scares the shit out of me and makes me realize I need to adjust my priorities so I don’t end up like that.