1. Great-Aunt Kitty
Kitty was my grandmother's younger sister, the last of eight children, born in 1890. I have a few photographs of her; when I showed them to my old friend Eric, he said, "You guys have been looking like that for a long time." Then again, Eric once told me that I look like Barbra Streisand.
When I visited Scotland in 1986 and 1987, Aunt Mary took me to see several of her cousins (Mary Kerr, Cameron and Dorothy, and Mame). Since their parents were the older Cameron children, they were a good deal older than Mary and Bill and my mother. They kept telling me that I looked like Kitty -- but no one liked Kitty very much, and so once someone mentioned her they'd start to trade stories about her: how she lorded it over my grandmother when she married an officer (RItchie), while my grandfather was still an enlisted man during World War I, how she had an affair while her husband was overseas, never told him about it, somehow sent the baby away to live elswhere (but it died, I think?), how her husband had a yacht on the Clyde but never invited my mother or aunt and uncle to visit there, how eventually he divorced her and married a dumpy little woman; how she hated her sister Millie (they met once by chance on the streets of Edinburgh, already middle-aged, and one said "You're looking so old!" and the other snapped "I was just about to say the same to you!"), how Granny wouldn't have her come live with her family once she was divorced and had no one else to go to, but when she visited she would get the best bed, and my greandfather would grimace as he took her tea up to her in the morning, how in her dotage she became a kleptomaniac and would be caught pinching fine things from the shops in Prince's Street.
Then my cousins-once-removed would remember that I was listening, and that they had just told me that I looked like this reprehensible Kitty: they'd catch themselves, look apologetic, and add, "But she was a fine- looking woman."
2. The Tidwells of Nashville
In the summer of 1983 I went to Knoxville, Tennessee, with my then boyfriend to a science fiction convention. He was a big fan, I was less of one, so at several points I wound up wandering around looking at things while he attended sessions devoted to writers that I wasn't so keen on. At one of those points, in the hotel lobby, a nice young man came up to me and asked whether I was related to the Tidwells of Nashville.
I was amused by the funny name, and I said no in a way that made him back off politely and go away. I told that story several times over the years, it seemed so amusing.
Then once I visited Jim's family at his grandmother's funeral, I was reminded that my grandmother was born in Tennessee, and wondered whether we might have any family connections. My stepmother didn't know, she gave me my aunt's address. (We hadn't been in touch since my father left, at that point 30 years before.)
Aunt Diane (who had herself remarried and now has the incomparably cool last name of Solo!) very kindly sent me some photocopies of family genealogical stuff -- it turns out that her mother's family, the Richardsons, are amazingly well-documented (I was even present in the Book! though there were some mistakes with my brother and sisters). And who should my grandmother's mother turn out to be but Della Tidwell, born outside Nashville.
She also sent some photos of the five RIchardson sisters, and the one standing behind my grandmother (who was born Hattie but changed her name to Betty) had exactly the same smile that I have (when I'm not trying to look attractive and mysterious, that is). TIdwells indeed.
Copyright 2002 Sibelan Forrester.
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