Long lost relatives: C/D

i mean, it's kind of a thing in every family?

When I was 17, my mother sat down on the edge of my bed very early one morning and woke me with the news that I (who had been raised an only child) have a half-sister who is roughly twenty years older than me and lives in Switzerland. She is my Dad's daughter from his teenage girlfriend. Even though I've known for 10 years now I still haven't met her because overall the situation with other family members is a bit messy complex. I would like to though and hope that one day I will.

I say that you should meet her if you get the chance. I know what it's like to have a small family so I understand the appeal. Best case senario, you get an awesome new relative. Worst case, she's a jerk or it's just weird and you don't stay in touch in which case you're not really any worse off then you were before.

There was a wedding announcement in the papaer a few months that was probably of my second cousin. He had my last name and lived in the same town that my grandfather and his brothers all lived in.

i have two first cousins that i've never met, the children of an uncle's first marriage in scotland that nobody is ever allowed to talk/ask about.

I found out I had a half-sister about six years ago. Like ENBB I was bought up an only child (I still consider myself an only child really). She's ten years older than me. I've met her once and she and my dad seem to have a good relationship now. She's a nice woman, but I wasn't very good at staying in contact. My dad can be laid back to the point of indifference, so I got a bit jealous when all of a sudden he was all "Heidi did so and so" "Your step-mother and I went to stay with Heidi" and it left me disinclined to stay in touch with her. I wish I hadn't let it get to me now - it's not her fault after all, but I have no idea how to reopen things now.

Interesting! I've never met anyone else with a surprise sibling. I still consider myself an only child too, btw. My Dad has seen Martina only once since I found out but they've since lost contact again. If he did have a relationship with her now I think I'd be jealous too even though, as you said, it wouldn't be her fault. I don't blame you for feeling the way you did. It's a very strange situation.

Yes, I somehow think I should feel more than I do. Also, she has exactly the same smile as me (it goes up a little higher on the left side) which was kind of strange to see on somone else's face. I guess people who've grown up with their sibblings are used to it, but it was really weird for me.

I was quite pleased when I read your post - I've not met anyone else either.

Totally classic. When you don't know your relatives it's like anyone could be related to you!
My whole family is made up of long lost relatives. I have a really uncommon name and in the age of google I've found quite a few people in other cities with the same name and when I ask my grandmother who these people are she says something like "oh, that's uncle artie's daughter, your grandpa hates uncle artie." or "We don't talk to Uncle Butsy because he is a lunatic but we know he's still alive because he picks up his social security checks."
Uncle Butsy is my grandmother's fraternal twin, btw, and I've never even met him.

Two new cousins appeared in my life, one on my mom's side circa 1990 and one on my dad's side circa 1999. I do see the maternal one from time to time at family gatherings but he's something like 20 years older than me.

I actually have tons of non-immediate relatives on my dad's side I've never met or only met once because he had several half-siblings who were much older than him and who he is not close to.

My late Great Uncle Marvin showed up at my Bar Mitzvah. He had apparently wanted to give me a gun as a present, but my parents would not allow it so I got a complete year set of Topps baseball cards instead.

Bar Mitzvah's exist solely for the purpose of digging up long lost relatives. Uncle Butsy mailed me a huge box of newspapers for my Bat Mitzvah--mostly the Sunday comics.

aws

Bahaha I can't even keep track of my long-found relatives. Though I have been meaning to ask my dad about the time he met his half-brother. Was it totally Jimmy Corriganed out? I do not know.

In other news: Margo in "Apartment 3-G" has been re-reunited with her biological mother.

I have at least one cousin I've never met - he is now in touch with my dad after placing an advert in the paper trying to trace his family (his father and my dad were brothers, but my uncle died and his wife took the kids and moved away and had nothing to do with my grandparents/her former in-laws), and has been to visit a few times, but I've never quite managed to meet him myself. He is a grandfather now himself, so there's a whole family out there I don't know! I say at least one cousin because I thought my uncle had more than one child, but perhaps they don't talk to each other after my cousin betraying his mother's wishes by getting back in touch with his father's family. It's very odd, and they don't feel like family to me, probably because this uncle of mine died before I was born and his family had long gone, so they were never really talked about - I was about 18 before I even knew my uncle had *had* a family before he died.

when I was in third grade one of my best friends turned out to be a cousin - our moms figured it out when comparing family trees. that was really strange.

My maternal great-grandfather and his brother fell out in the 1920s because the brother shitcanned my great-grandfather and became a terrible alcoholic and lived in dire poverty. After the falling out they both had sons and named them William. My dad met my grandfather's cousin, then a important city councillor, at a function and asked him if he was any relation to the William he knew and he said knew he was his cousin but had never met him. He told my dad that he had looked at his family tree and found we were descended from horse-thieves from Donegal. A building in Glasgow Caledonian University is named after him.

Oh and I have two cousins I never met because my uncle had three daughters with three different women in three different countries and only made a family with the last woman and daughter.

i have whole chunks of family (couins, 2nd cousins, great aunts/uncles) that i don't know. my paternal grandmother and grandfather each had 10-12 siblings each, with roughly 6 to 8 surviving to adulthood/marriage/kids. both of my great-grandmothers were total gorgons and routinely cut people out of the family without a second thought. i remember being totally mortified at my cousin's bar mitzvah over 20 years ago when a woman asked if i knew who she was. i said no, and she snapped, "i'm your aunt rachael!" oops. i was tempted to reply, "oh - so you're the one who killed uncle abe with your neglect," but i held my tongue.

this just happened to me recently. my dad changed his last name to his middle name when he was 20 something to be less "jewish". a few months ago at work someone sent an email to the entire company. she had my dad's original last name. it's not that common of a name, so i wrote her and told her who my grandparents are and where they're from to see if we were related. we were. our grandfather's were cousins. so i guess that makes us second cousins. nice girl.

my wife was contacted yesterday by some kid in Hungary claiming to be her half-brother. we always knew this was a possibility but to have it actually happen is ... weird. so far it seems totally for real.

Lock down the movie rights now so we can see a heartwarming drama in 2013 just in time for the Oscars.

so far the broken english is making it more like a jim jarmusch movie

"my tears are bursted with joy when I am finding half-sister" etc

Uh, are you sure you didn't mean Perfect Strangers.

Though, god help me, my first vision of who would play this person was Roberto Benigni so maybe Jarmusch IS the right comparison.

i have an estranged half-brother who is by the looks of things something of an electrohead stoner - wonder what sort of movie that would occasion

Dude Where's My Bovril?

Poppage Brothers

he's also a teacher o_O

Though, god help me, my first vision of who would play this person was Roberto Benigni so maybe Jarmusch IS the right comparison.

do not want to see Benigni playing a 17 yo. actually I don't think I want to see Benigni playing anything at all after that holocaust clown movie

Browsing possible relatives at ancestry.com. Based on photographic observations I have made, I've reached the conclusion that all white people look the same.

Ha, forgot that ILX hyperlinks that website automatically for some reason.

I have two first cousins ive never met. my uncle has three different daughters, by three different women, born in three different countries. chile, cuba, and spain. ive only met my Spanish cousin. the Chilean cousin named her daughter after Pinochet ("agustina"). the Cuban cousin is a scientist and lives in London.

My dad's cousin died last weekend (Their dads were brothers, my grandfather and great-uncle.)

I'm sorta jealous because my great-uncle had four kids, each having children of their own. On our side, it's just me and my sister. No cousins. So I'm browsing Facebook and seeing all of these people with my last name who vaguely resemble me, and it's just really strange.

Even with the Tap*Out shirts some of them are wearing.