Family Mystery

 

We visited the greenhouses yesterday. Inside it was as warm and bright and verdant as summer. I felt like skipping, but I restrained myself for my children's sake.: ) There is still lots of snow outside, but today is the third day of 40° temperatures and it is all soft and melty like whipped cream.

I opened the stack of new notebooks I received for my birthday back in January. I keep a diary and regularly fill them up. Each morning I record the date, the weather, my blood pressure (I struggle with hypertension; I am, unfortunately, a sensitive, nervous sort) and little quotes, notes and daily happenings.

I have always been intrigued by my family history, but it is nearly impossible to learn anything beyond the names and dates of the people who came before me. How I wish that some of them would have kept a diary, or the letters they received, or even a kitchen receipt book! On my father's side of the family tree there is nothing. We do not even have a true name. My maiden name (Nodzo) is an invention. It exists nowhere in the world except upstate New York. My great-grandfather Jacob Nodzo came to the United States from the Kingdom of Galicia in 1909. He and his family were musicians. He had two brothers and two sisters and each of the three Nodzo "branches" has a different telling of our family's origin. One branch talks of a noble Austrian heritage, another says Hungarian, Jacob identified himself as Ukrainian, but his daughter, my great aunt Helen told me that her father was Jewish. So who knows? (My father has a rare autoimmune disease that primarily effects people of Eastern European Jewish descent, so the Jewish thing makes sense to me, but Dad insists his grandfather was Ukrainian Catholic)  As for me, I plan on leaving behind enough notebooks and letters to satisfy any of my great-great grandchildren's curiosity about their ancestor.

Really wonderful fountain pens $3.30 each: Platinum Preppy