My paternal great-grandfather (father's father's father) and his predecessors have been a great mystery to the family.

He died years before my parents met and my grandfather basically kept him and most of his own siblings at arm's length. As I grew up I knew all my kin from my paternal grandmother's side as well as both sides from my mother's side of the family.

My grandfather wouldn't speak much about his family, the most I remember him saying was after some guy came through doing genealogy research. My grandfather's response to me on that was "don't shake that (family) tree, you don't know what kinds of nuts may fall out".

Flash forward decades later (and decades after he and all his contemporaries are gone) and I get the genealogy bug and since that side is a mystery and I had done the DNA thing through Ancestry.com...

After doing some digging I find that my great-grandfather was adopted by his uncle (this was somewhat known, but nice to have it confirmed) but not who his parents were. I also found multiple arrest reports for him being drunk and fighting (no mention of Sonics). And then finally a story about his wife being "accidentally" run over by a train (apparently he was an abusive drunk, whispered family rumor has always been that she committed Suicide By Train and the newspaper story seems to indicate that if you read between the lines).

During all of this I ended up getting in contact with a son of my grandfather's youngest brother (ie: a great-uncle). It turns out that sibling was only a few years older than my father and my father idolized him. He was also at least as big a piece of shite as my great-grandfather as he eventually came to live with my grandfather and his family but then my grandfather kicked him out and cut off any communications with him because he kept getting arrested (drunk and disorderly, fighting, etc).

This cousin basically lives life from bowl of weed to bowl of weed ("I only smoke two bowls a day" was his comment) after a life spent as a roofer (his career ended when he injured his back after falling off a roof).

We had the one phone call, he kept calling me by my father's name (which is also my first name but I never go by it outside of legal documents) and that was it. It was polite and cordial, but a bit concerning as he seemed to latch onto this with a passive-aggressive desperation of someone who had been on a deserted island for decades and finally met a new person.

My dad was an alcoholic as was my cousin (same side of the family) so I know the warning signs of co-dependency and this guy had it to spare. From a few nuggets during our phone call I realized he was positioning me to start asking for money. I decided to let this sleeping dog go back to sleep and move away from it so I never contacted him again.

Over the following years I have randomly gotten increasingly demanding and aggressive text messages from him. Nothing threatening, just incoherent rage in an attempt to elicit a response. He lives on the other side of the country and from our hours-long chat that one time I got the distinct feeling that he doesn't have the means to travel far. Still, it's annoying and underscores what my grandfather tried to tell me all those years ago.

This post was edited on 2/2/20 at 11:27 am