{"id":1802,"date":"2016-01-10T16:46:58","date_gmt":"2016-01-10T16:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/?p=1802"},"modified":"2016-01-10T16:46:58","modified_gmt":"2016-01-10T16:46:58","slug":"things-not-spoken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/?p=1802","title":{"rendered":"Things Not Spoken"},"content":{"rendered":"

They were always referred to collectively as “the \"david-gloria\"babies.”<\/p>\n

I don’t remember when I first became aware that Mom had two siblings who died at birth. Their grave went unmarked for nearly thirty years in a plot adjacent to my grandparents. A part of me thinks I always knew about “the babies”\u00a0and another part of me thinks I really was not aware of them\u00a0until I was in high school.\u00a0It may be that I’m confusing my memory of their existence with my memory of their names.<\/p>\n

The few times\u00a0they were mentioned, they were referred to\u00a0as “the babies.” Never by name–which probably just made it all the more real. It was the longest time before I could really even remember their names which I originally discovered in the old 1950-era Ufkes genealogy.\u00a0\u00a0It was not until my oldest daughter was twenty-four that I even\u00a0realized that (except for an “e” at the end) that Gloria’s middle name is the same as that of my own daughter. My own mother was nearing six and nearly twelve when they were born. She would have been\u00a0aware of Grandma’s pregnancy and the eventual outcome.\u00a0No one ever said, ever, that Gloria was born just three weeks after Grandma’s mother died of cancer in January of 1954.<\/p>\n

Whenever the babies were mentioned, it was never initiated by me. Never.\u00a0Despite being \u00a0aware of it in my early teens when I started my genealogy research, not being a parent myself, and never having experienced the death of a close family member, I knew this was a topic that I was not<\/em> to bring up. Period. And so I didn’t. When it was mentioned (which was rare), I simply listened\u00a0and did not ask questions.<\/p>\n

The only one who mentioned the babies was my mother and it was not \u00a0often. If my grandparents ever mentioned them (which I find highly doubtful), I have no memory of it.\u00a0\u00a0And I knew better<\/em> than to ask my Grandmother about something of which my own Mother rarely spoke. There were unwritten rules and that was one of them.<\/p>\n

Some things are simply difficult. There’s no other word.<\/p>\n

There was actually only one veiled reference to the babies\u00a0in my Grandparents’ presence that I remember.\u00a0It was when my own daughter was born in the early 1990s. My mother, grandparents, and my in-laws had come to the hospital for the delivery. While there were no complications, things\u00a0were not quite progressing as quickly as originally hoped. I came out to the waiting room at one point and my grandparents were gone. Mom said that Granddad had said Grandma “needed some air.” Her face and her tone had that “you know what I’m talking about Michael don’t ask any questions look” to it and I knew exactly to what she was referring.<\/p>\n

It’s allowed not to ask family about somethings. People are allowed their emotions and allowed to handle things in their own way.<\/p>\n

There is one thing…<\/p>\n

I wish I knew where they\u00a0got the names.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They were always referred to collectively as “the babies.” I don’t remember when I first became aware that Mom had two siblings who died at birth. Their grave went unmarked for nearly thirty years in a plot adjacent to my grandparents. A part of me thinks I always knew about “the babies”\u00a0and another part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}