Wow, so much has gone on since I popped my head in yesterday.
Welcome, welcome, welcome, @MassiveWordSalad , we are delighted to see you. My DSD had her blood pressure taken at a research thing we all did and her diastolic is very high. We’ve been measuring it for a few days now and suddenly it came down this morning, so we think it might be connected to her vast consumption of Pepsi Max - too much caffeine and aspartame. She cut down yesterday but her pulse is still high, though. We hope she’ll be referred to a cardiologist. It all might be connected to her extreme prematurity. It is odd how worried I am for someone I’m not related to.
I love Clara Capybara and Daughters and would love them to come round and do my en-suite renovation, lay my new patio and sort out the windows. You know how they say that things like windows last 30 years? Well, they’re bloody right. The house was built in 1995 and everything is falling apart.
My dad did our family tree over 20 years ago - the English side, as the Irish side was very difficult to find records for. Probably much easier these days. It turns out my mum’s family were quite bourgeois and lived in Nottingham where I was also living at the time. We went round to all the addresses and I was living less than a mile from my great-great grandfather’s first home. There was a picture in the paper from the 1980s of a descendant of his, who must be my fourth cousin three times removed or something. She looked EXACTLY like my mother - Uncanny.
And we discovered my maternal grandfather had had three families, instead of two. We knew about one of them as my grandfather had sent my mum a picture of his two children. But his other son and daughter knew nothing about my mum or uncle! His wife had kept it from them. This also explained why my DM wasn’t told about his death until after the funeral.
We haven’t done the DNA testing but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some Eastern European Jewish heritage, given how much my uncle, brother and cousin look Jewish.