I ordered a few different DNA tests to that I could learn some more about my origins and to see if that would help provide more answers about the origins of the Silver man.
That is a reference to my maternal grandfather the inimitable Percy Silver who was born in Canada and came to the U.S. at the age of 5.
It was during his kindergarten year that he told my great-grandparents that the school was filled with foreigners.
We used to get a good laugh out of that story and no one laughed harder than my grandfather as he reminded us those kids didn’t speak Yiddish or French.
Anyhoo, his paternal grandparents along with their children emigrated from Kishnev to Canada during the early 20th century.
Sometime after they immigrated my great-grandfather met my great-grandmother, got married and had kids.
What I don’t know is what happened to the family that was left behind in the old country, at least not on the Silver side.
I had heard they were Silverman and not Silvers, but have recently come across information that makes it look like they were Zilberman.
The trail has been a bit harder to pick up and follow than with a bunch of my other relatives, but I am not the type of guy who gives up easily.
Trappers, Shower Heads & Video Games
Two nights ago I replaced the shower head in the master bathroom and wondered if I would get lucky and that would solve my hot water issue.
Didn’t really think it would because I figured based upon what I knew I probably have a cartridge that is failing but figured it wouldn’t hurt to make the change because the old head was done.
Couldn’t switch it to a different setting any more so it was time to replace it anyway.
Stood there thinking about what resources I had used to try and figure out the connections to my grandfather’s family and tried to recall if he had shared anything that would be useful.
He had told me that his father had worked as a trapper but that he had primarily been an insurance salesman, neither of which provided much information.
Grandpa has been gone for a decade and his father for more than 60 so neither are available to answer questions. My mother and aunt don’t know the answers to some of these questions and aren’t sure if they ever did.
I am not surprised by it, because some of these things aren’t the sort of stuff you think about or are concerned with when you are young.
I certainly wasn’t.
Given that my great-grandparents and their parents were all born during the 19th century the record keeping was far different than it is now.
****
Somewhere around midnight I am sitting in the loft playing a game on the PS5 called God Of War. In between the battles between characters and monsters there are puzzles that require logic to solve.
The younger Mr. Wilner is very good at the puzzles, especially if there are patterns. He picks those apart pretty quickly and occasionally catches me staring at him and asks what the problem is.
I tell him if he ever chooses to become a father he’ll understand there is a certain pleasure in watching your child think. I also tell him that I learn by following his thought pattern and that it helps me follow the structure so that I don’t need to ask for help in the future.
The game is one of the ways I turn my brain off and just be. It helps me reset and decompress and it’s a big help when it comes to figuring out the answers to real world stuff that is puzzling me.
Because sometimes you have to walk away from situations and circumstances so that you can let what lies beneath the surface come to the top.
****
There is something sitting in the back of my mind that is tied into trying to figure out some of what I am missing with the Silvers.
There is a sense that grandpa said something that will help me flesh out some of what I am missing here, if I can only remember.
If I can’t I’ll keep going and see what I can come up with. Got no doubt that I haven’t tapped into all of the resources so there are directions yet to be traveled.
But as an advocate of work smarter not harder I am focused on not reinventing the wheel.
Where I Come From
Still haven’t received the results from the second test but am very curious to see what they show. Or rather because there is no central DNA database I am curious to see if the second place provides new matches.
Maybe that’s where I find more links to the grandfather’s family. Maybe I’ll find more links to a set of my great-grandparents on the other side.
One of my great-grandfathers died a 100 years ago, he was only 53. Got to imagine that he probably never could have imagined that one day a great-grandson would be thinking about him.
Got to imagine that 135 years after he came to the U.S. there really was no way he could have pictured some almost middle aged father sitting in a house in Texas writing about him.
Who knows, maybe he would have had some sort of grandfatherly wisdom to share about life and where we come from.
Probably some sort of shared likes/dislikes, but who knows. Kind of interesting to think about though.
