They tried to erase my grandmother

her experience was a norm, not an exception

I dabble in genealogy from time to time because no one else in my family has ever tried to document our roots. One story that haunts me is how my paternal grandmother, who was born sometime in the 1920s, had almost no history. Her mother routinely listed her as a sister or cousin on census reports, and I could never understand why.

My own mother told me the family lore is that my paternal great-grandmother, who used to be a maid for big estate homes on Mount Desert Island, was raped by either the homeowner or another staff member. In those days, you could not have a baby out of wedlock, so my great-grandmother hid her child’s identity.

Eventually, she (my g-grandmother) married a kind, soft-spoken man who was older than her by some years. Together, they raised my grandmother and remained extremely close with her until her death. When I look through records, I can see her name + relation changed slightly in census reports, and sometimes on old family documents, her name is scratched out or written over completely.

Eventually, she married a much older man (I believe she was 20ish and he was in his 40s) from Boston. He was German and came from a long line of farmers and landowners in Massachusetts. His great-great-whatever was once one of the largest landowners in Lexington. All that greatness must have diluted down the line, though, because this man who married my grandmother was a tyrant. And together, they had one child--my tyrant father, who took after his horrible, no-good father in that he thought it was totally ok to beat his wife, drink excessively, and essentially be an absolute waste of breath.

My grandmother, by all accounts, remained a quiet, thoughtful, and steadfast presence. Always in the background, cleaning up messes and mending everyone else’s physical and emotional wounds (but never hers, which eventually killed her). She died when I was a baby.

But everyone who ever told me about her said that I look and sound and act just like her. “Spittin image,” they said. And my heart would swell at that sentiment, but I always felt incredibly sad for her. She was surrounded by terrible men who never looked out for her-- except for the man her mother married, who was kind. I wonder what she would think of me and how I turned out.

And I wonder if she ever made peace with her own story before she passed.