A Rich History

I've told you before about my father-in-law,
his rough childhood, and how he was such a character.

My mother-in-law's family and ancestry
was very different:
rich in history and very interesting.
Many of the stories I've heard
from elderly members of my wife's family
were fascinating!

- - - - - - - -

My MIL's mother
was from a small town just inside France near Alsace
along the French/German border.
She came over just a few weeks
after the sinking of the famed Lusitania.
Although she's passed on now,
(she died when she was 94)
she told me once that everyone on board
was very nervous for that reason.
I then remember her mood suddenly changed
and she laughed as she told me
that she was quite young when she came over
(and very attractive,
as I'd seen a photo taken of her then)
and she had fun flirting with all the sailors.

My MIL's father moved here about the same time
from a part of Hungary
that was close to the border with Austria.
I don't think my MIL's parents even knew each other
until their families moved to the states.
So they met and got married.

My MIL's family was pretty well-off financially.
Much of her father's family remained in Hungary,
including her grandparents.
They probably decided to stay put
because they owned a brick factory
and didn't want to get rid of the business.

They kept in contact with their son's family in the States
through most of the 1930s.

And then, in the late 1930s...
Nazi Germany invaded Hungary.
Well, I'm not sure invaded is the word,
because the whole thing was very complicated.
Maybe "under German control" is a better term.
The town where the grandparents lived
was taken over as well
and Nazi troops ordered them
to turn over their brick factory.
They refused.
Nazis took them to the middle of town,
rounded up the townspeople to watch
and made an example of my the grandparents.
The Nazis said to the townspeople,
"This is what happens if you don't obey orders."
My MIL's grandparents were put aboard a train,
and taken to a concentration camp.

Meanwhile,
their son in the states had lost contact with them,
and after hearing
that Nazi Germany had invaded Hungary,
he feared the worst.
He was getting no news at all from his homeland.
He began to drink heavily
and began to physically abuse his wife and daughter,
my MIL who would've been 12 or 13 at the time.

World War II began and ended
and he was finally able to hear from
the townspeople where he lived.
He was told about what the Nazis did to his parents,
about hauling them off to a camp.

He also found out that in that camp,
they died of exposure.

This worsened the drinking and abuse at home
and it never got better.

After several years, his wife filed for divorce
(which was uncommon at the time - around 1950).
and she eventually remarried.
(I got to know my wife's step-grandfather pretty well.
He was a lightweight boxer in the early 1930s).
Meanwhile, her ex-husband died in 1959,
homeless and alcoholic.

- - - - - - - -

Remember how I talked about
my wife's grandmother's family
who came from the French/German border?
The "baby" sister of my wife's grandmother
is still alive and she told me a couple of great stories.
Bear with me, they're both short:

Around the turn of the last century (1900),
their mother owned silkworms.
They'd spin natural silk
and their mother would sell the silk in Paris!
Pretty cool, huh?

Especially in the region where they lived then,
there weren't any cars.
Just horses and buggies, horses and wagons.
About this time, in this part of Europe
there was a big outbreak of dysentery,
an intestinal infection that can be life-threatening.
They knew of a family friend
who was seen in his horse and wagon.
Townspeople recalled seeing him
unresponsive at the helm
while the horse trotted along home,
and it parked the wagon in the barn
like so many times it had done before
with its master's commands.
But this time, the horse had done it on its own.
The family went out to greet the man
and found him dead at the reins,
presumably of dysentery.

- - - - - - - -

My father's entire family was from Italy.
It would be very hard to do any kind of research
on that side of the family.

My mother's family is from in and around West Virginia.
We have done research on one branch of that family tree
and have come up with
- what amounts to -
350 years of blacksmiths and farmers.
HA!
Probably nice people,
but (so far), nothing as fascinating
as my mother-in-law's family.