KimonoSoul said:
I just found out that we have a nun in the family. (I have lots of long lost relatives that I never knew existed...kind of sad really...) I'm going to look her up next time I make it to the old homestead.
I was wondering...how many of you have a nun, monk, priest, minister, etc. in your family?
Well, my father was supposed to become a priest, being the youngest son and therefore not having any claim on any of the land inheritance, especially with three older brothers*. Obviously, he didn't...
(Can hardly imagine him, with his rebellious nature against authority figures, submitting to the Church. Probably just as well he ran away when he did from the seminary prep school his father had sent him to....)
However, I have this gaping chasm in my own family history, insofar as I have never met any of my mother's relatives, or even know who they are. She had four sisters and one brother; I believe one sister died in her teens, and the brother may have died from cancer, but not before he married and had children of his own. I have photographs, but no names, and a vague idea where my mother's sisters might have been living in Poland at the time my mother died, but my father steadfastly refuses to tell me anything, claiming he can't remember, it was too long ago, etc. etc. Well, he's 91 years old now, so I suppose that's legit, but I've been asking him for years, and the answer has always been the same, so the whole "I don't remember" is just a cover, in my opinion.
All I have is my father's side of the family, which, before WWII, were landed aristocracy, one branch of which can trace their history back to 1600. If there were any religious among them, I'd have to pay megabucks to find out, from a history professor who's done work on tracing the family.
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*Now that I think of it, he's the only surviving son - none of his brothers ever married or had children, so if it were possible for him to reclaim his property in Poland, he has the right to. However, I don't think the government in Poland has gone so far as to restore family holdings to the families that had them before Communism, especially to ex-pats who are believed dead - which is another long story I won't bore you with here.