Most of us have been sent emails saying that if we help them save millions of dollars from this or that we can keep a percentage for ourselves. Tempting?
I can only wonder what kind of person actually falls for this sort of thing? Is it little ol’ desperate grandma thinking about turning a good deed into cash? Or perhaps, it is a greedy sophisticated business man or woman…who thinks they are smarter than the crooks they are dealing with and… eventually get robbed or wacked?
The answer , I read, is a little bit of both.
So you can imagine how I felt when too burly men walked into my office and said that my Grandfather had passed away and I was set for an inheritance. What ‘grandfather?’
As they say, so began an adventure. My ‘evil’ grandmother divorced when my father was an infant and began calling him by a completely different name utilizing her maiden name; in the days before Social Security this was an easy matter. So my father grew up little knowing his father and eventually through my grandmother’s machinations lost track of him completely. We always wanted to look him up… but couldn’t find him as it appeared that he retired into a corner of the United States in which the population was 32…. Rulo, Nebraska.
As it turned out, the small inheritance rightfully went to our mother… but discovering a bit about my grandfather, seeing where he lived, visiting some of the places he belonged helped answer a few questions. We did discover that my father also had one living relative from that side… a cousin, and I have been conversing with one of his children… who was kind enough to provide a picture taken in 1974.
My grandfather is seated on the far left and aside from the fact that the clothes are … well… ’70’s rural… it is a glympse of a family I never thought existed. Heredity is not the total equation in determining who we become… but it is important.
So, treasures surely do exist… not necessarily in gold and silver, but in discovering a bit about ourselves. The real treasure is finding our roots and a little bit of who we are.
Roger Freberg
PS. My father went by the same name as I have legally, but his real name was the same as his father’s… Harold Hjersted. I had thought many times of changing to the patrilinial name… but we are who we are regardless… so I left it alone.