Nothing funny about feldspar

My Sister’s Child has been married off, and so the last of my familial obligations have been met. I went to the wedding, which was both nice and uncomfortable as many weddings are, ate a bit of cake, wished the happy couple a good future, and left.

On the trip down there I stopped a couple of places, including the state department of vital statistics because I wanted to get copies of my parents’ birth certificates. Except for the trouble finding the place, it was a relatively painless experience — nice for dealing with bureaucracy. This office only does birth and death certs, so they’ve got their system down pretty pat.

You go in, fill out a form requesting the document, hand it to a guy who checks that they have it, then go pay at another window, and then after a brief time (I spent 20 minutes total) the first guy calls you up to pick up your papers.

How interesting it must be, when you get people like me who are trying to do some genealogy research. I went in, knowing my grandmother was not married when Mom was born, but unsure what name my mother had on her birth certificate. So I put both names on there — Grandma’s maiden name (let’s call it Finney) and Mom’s childhood name (let’s call it Jones) and said I wasn’t sure which was on it.

The guy looked it up, said he’d found it and I could go pay and then I’d get it in a few minutes. When he handed it to me, he had a little grin on his face.

So of course I looked at the cert right away. Mom was listed under “Finney”, but “Jones” didn’t appear anywhere on the page. Mom’s dad was “Smith” — a man I had never heard of, and who has very little tracking in the Ancestry.com databases.

They’re all dead, so I can’t ask them what the story is. Which is too bad, but really, how different is that from any other family’s stories? We all have the ones we’d rather not go into, the tales where we don’t really tell the whole story. They become part of the fabric of the family, even if the weave is a little loose.