This has been quite a week. I was doing some research on my family tree earlier this week and while looking in the SS death index for a grandfathers information I ran across my brother's name. It said he died in 2005.
Wow! that really threw me. I had not talked to Gerry since early in 2003. He called me about Judy and we talked for a while about him moving to Texas and what was going on in both our lives. At that time he gave me an email address so that we could keep in touch. I invited him to visit my Family site on the web.
The last time he logged into the site was July 6th of 2005 and the record from SS says he died on Sept. 1st of that same year.
None of the family heard anything about it at the time. If I hadn't come across that record on the SS site we still wouldn't know.
What makes me mad is that I hadn't noticed that he hadn't been on the site in so long. And if I had noticed what would I have done? He didn't give me a phone number or address when we talked. Just the email, but I should have tried to keep in touch better. I should have taken the responsibility of staying in contact.
4 comments:
I haven't yet found anything on his death, but I haven't busted out all my tools yet.
I used to feel responsible for keeping up family connections, but I got frustrated and disillusioned when no one responded in turn. I felt like I was always chasing people who didn't care about me. Then one day my Uncle Roy called out of the blue (I hadn't heard from him in 4 years) and told me that he loved me and was proud of me, that he thought about me often, but "we're just a dysfunctional family and I'm not good at this keeping up stuff." He made me understand that people have their own ways of interacting with family. So I left Uncle Roy to his dysfunctional ways and let him take the reins, and didn't feel so responsible for it all.
Having said that, I think it's very odd that NO one in your family was notified!
Oh Sharon, I am so sorry...We can only do the best we can do right?? XXOX!!
Where did my comment go? I promise I commented yesterday Gran.
Please don't blame yourself, there is only so much could have done. I can't imagine how you must be feeling but please try not to put the blame on yourself because in a situation like this I'm not sure blame is appropriate, sadness...yes, confusion...yes, blame...no.
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