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It wasn’t until I was pregnant with my first child that I learned I’d had a sister.
I wasn’t taking things as easy as my Nana would have liked, and so we were having a disagreement over some chore I was stubbornly trying to do and she just blurted it out. I’d had a stillborn sister. I was stunned. But that was the end of the information – and the conversation - as far as she was concerned. I knew it would be a hopeless mission to approach my mum about it as we had never been a very open, sharing family.
I couldn’t ask my father at that time either, as my parents had long-since divorced, he had another family, and we didn’t have any sort of open communication whatsoever. It wasn’t until years later, when I had contracted the genealogy bug, and the internet was becoming a ‘thing’, that I had the means and ability to chase up on the facts.
I dug around on available websites until I found where she’d been buried, but could not locate a grave so I contacted the local council in charge of that particular cemetery. In a reply, I was told as a matter-of-fact that she had been interred in a mass grave. This was apparently the norm back then, and there were no markers in place at the site.
I felt sick reading the email, but also (unhappily) resigned to the fact that there was nothing I could change about the situation. I likewise learned that my sister had never been given a name. That not only broke my heart, but made me feel angry, and more than a little bewildered. But by the time I had found all this information out I was not going to be able to approach my mum about it for answers because she was in a stage of Alzheimer’s; and my father was still pretty difficult to talk to in any depth about the past, especially his shared past with Mum.
I was only four years old when Mum was pregnant, but I only have vague memories of this time. She disappeared from the house for a while, and my grandparents were suddenly there with me and the mood was sombre. As I mentioned, communication was not easy in our family, as evidenced a year later when, and without any prior warning, my parents one day presented me with a baby who they’d just adopted. Ta-da! Here’s your new brother. (Now, I would be itching to research his family tree, but sadly he has no interest in finding out who his birth parents were.)
Both my parents are now deceased so I am never going to learn anything further about the circumstances surrounding my sister and her almost-birth. The one question I would dearly have loved having answered would have been regarding my sister’s name – or lack thereof – and what they might have called her had she lived. I wish that is something I could give her even now, along with a marker for her resting place in the cemetery.
r.i.p little sis <3
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From @ravenruis