How did I get here...

"you may ask yourself- well how did I get here?" Talking Heads

I refer to this song, pretty much daily. It's not because I love David Byrne (I do), but it seems like I can never truly believe that this is my life. This introspection is not of the existential variety, it is more concrete.

How did I end up in small town Vermont?
At which crossroads did I do an about face and fall in love with a man 14 years my senior who has very little in common with me outside of our admiration for Davis Byrne?
When did it become reality that I would work for and very closely with an obsessive compulsive son with a serious Oedipus complex?

These questions may never be answered, but my longing for some understanding may not elude me for long.
I have joined ancestry.com.

A lot of people are interested in genealogy. It's fun to dive into the past, the same way it's fun to rifle through boxes in your grandparents basement. I wonder if my curiousity of the unknown isn't sparked by the fact that I know little to nothing about my fathers side of my family. There is a ton of information about my mothers side of the family, which is made easier by the fact that I know the names of most relatives going back four generations. Italians pass down family history the way they pass down recipes. While I like learning more about them it's the unknown characters of my paternal side that turned me into a fixated, family tree detective.

These are the things I do know about my paternal side : the names of my father and his parents, my grandparents divorced after having only one child together (spoiler alert), and that my father grew up southern RI.

After many an hour on my new favorite time wasting website of choice I have come up with some pretty intersting information:
My paternal grandmother's parents immigrated form Poland to the US.
They were most likely Jewish.
My child is the only child of a mother who was an only child of her father who was the only child of his mother who was the only child of her parents. Confused yet? Needless to say, not a lot of extended family on that end.
My father's father moved to the south, remarried and had three more children. In his obituary there was no mention of my father. This makes me a little sad and also more understanding of the fact that he is a total flake of a parent.
I know the names of my grandfather's other children (an aunt and two uncles) and have seen one of them on facebook.

Now what to do with this information?
Is this my way of knowing my father without having to know him?
Has the internet opened an unnatural portal that should be less easily navigated for a reason?

I'll let you know once Steven's family tree starts to grow. I've started one for him too, mainly because like me he knows very little about his father and his fathers family. I started this "work" under the guise that Lydia should know this information. But really it's because my family tree's trail is getting cold and I can't stop.