The man that helped raise my birth mother. Sadly, he passed long before my birth mom and I ever re-connected.

I wish I could have met my grand-father on my mother's side... he was a Sagittarius like me and we had a lot in common personality-wise. Like how we close the door and wait a couple minutes if we see someone outside we don't wanna talk to XDD
He passed away only a couple years before I was born, and I feel his loss a lot despite never really knowing him

There's a handful of relatives on either side of my adoptive family that I'd probably like if I had been around while they were alive...

I'm kinda fascinated by my grandfather. He died 4 years before I was born, my gran claims to have felt him when he died and says she started to feel alive again from the time my mom was pregant with me.

I always thought I'd like to drive his camper van when I'd get my license, but it's still in my gran's garage. I just think I lack the engineering skills needed, though maybe I have a secret wish that I would've wanted to learn those skills. Not anymore though... I think. :>

Would've loved/love to get to know him though, not sure why. I think I'm very different from him, but still would've loved to meet him.

You are all making me think really hard.... I still have a few Elders I take care of but at this point they all have enough cumulative health issues going on that I wouldn't be surprised if I lose them within the next year or two. And now you are making me wonder -what's the most meaningful way to help future generations get to know these Elders?
Record videos? Have them dictate their stories and illustrate timeline books with photos?
The locket with braided hair from my mother's mother's mother's mother was a prized possession of my great-aunt, and then her younger daughter when she died... maybe next time I cut their hair I should create a few?

Because some of them have amazing stories and personalities and I'd love to somehow preserve such vivid characters so that later on family members can all say, "Hey you know that one ancestor who lived in Australia for a few years to learn how to rope cattle and then went home and rode a wild elk because of a dare? And went to jail for it after someone talked too loudly about why he was injured at the pub, until his father-in-law got him out?" and everyone will know who that is.


The ones I want to meet that I never got to were my maternal grandfather's maternal grandfather's father's older brother (his oldest daughter caught the eye of a ****head local minor official, who had the power to just take her. To get her back he pretended his wife could cast evil eye, and snuck in oleander branches as firewood into the house of the **** until everyone in the house was coming down ill, which he claimed was the evil eye at work. I don't know why he wasn't worried about the daughter coming down ill too, but it did work and they got her back -they had to flee the city afterwards because the neighbors all also believed his wife was a witch, but at least they fled as a family), and my maternal grandfather's paternal grandfather (he was a tiny Lithuanian who fled the pogroms and fetched up in England. Didn't speak a word of English at first but managed to do so well he became an engineer specializing in locomotives. But then got sent to the Boer War which was apparently all about economic conquest and trains, according to family, and got caught in a boiler explosion which damaged his eyes. After that he switched to plumbing because he could do just about all of that by feel and hand, and then took his whole family and moved to America because he heard that the gold rushes meant towns would grow suddenly and he figured that meant constant work for plumbers (didn't turn out that way, since mostly none of the boom towns had central cisterns or public bathhouses with actual plumbing, which was where he was figuring to get hired; well-work was more than he could do with his level of blindness, though apparently he did a *lot* of fixing of hand-pumps). Anyhow I've always been curious about those two. I have more stories about the latter of them, since he lived more recently so I can hear about him directly from my maternal grandfather, who knew him. The first one is more a package of some letters with strange references and family stories filling in the gaps of the letters.