Sometimes as an adult you learn things about your family that you never knew.
My mom was visiting and we decided to try to find "the house on Liberty Street" -- the house my great-grandfather built from a Sears kit after the flood of Vanport, where my grandmother was raised. My grandmother had taken me by there just a few weeks before she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. I had tried to re-find it a number of times over the years, but never could find it.
So, I drove us out to Northeast Portland to find Liberty St. When we got to Northeast, I knew vaguely where it was but told my mom to look it up in Maps. She opened maps and said aloud "Ok, North Liberty Street" as she typed.
"Wait... did you say North? I thought it was in Northeast?"
"Me and Aunt Karen were always told it was in North Portland."
"Oh well no wonder I couldn't find it again! I was looking in Northeast Portland!"
Liberty Street is a very fractioned street -- it is present in multiple places along a 3 mile stretch, but does not exist for long stretches and each stretch is just a block or two long before dead-ending. So, we decided to just go to the first "North Liberty St" section that Maps took us too, and then figure out how to check the next section from that point.
It turned out that grandma must have been guiding us because as soon as we drove down the street I recognized it... the blue kit house with white trim. We pulled over and snapped some photos, and I googled what Sears kit houses looked like to see if I could find the model. It was an adaptation of the "Franklin" model.
All of those years I kept trying to find it and I was looking in the wrong part of town!
The next day, walking home from brunch, we were talking about my great grandpa. I remembered his little green house in St. Johns with the train set in the basement and the chartreuse ceramic cantering horse statuettes that used to decorate the 1950's style room divider shelves. I remember staring at them while my mom brushed my hair... I digress.
"What happened to that house? It would be worth so much money now," I said.
"Well Jim stole it all when your grandma passed away. There was a ledger. Your grandmother was a wealthy woman and had multiple streams of income coming from many houses that your great grandfather fixed up and sold. Your great grandfather carried the contracts."
"What?!" Shock. I thought we were generationally poor. I thought Jim was from a wealthy family since he owned the cattle ranch. I didn't know my grandmother owned anything outside of the marriage.
"She told everyone she wanted Jim to divvy it all up fairly between us kids. He decided to keep it all. Including our family rings and your great great grandmothers wedding ring that was supposed to go to Aunt Karen. He did the same thing to his first wife Vera."
I knew that he was supposed to pass out the rings. And I knew that when I signed up for a photography class and asked him if I could have my grandmothers camera (she was an avid photographer), he told me his new wife (he re-married 2 months after my grandmother passed) said no, because it might be worth something. But I didn't know that he stole our family's generational wealth from us by completely disregarding my grandmother's last wishes as she was dying, very suddenly, from long undiagnosed pancreatic cancer.
Now it all makes sense. Why he suddenly didn't want us over for holidays. Why he said no to giving me my grandmother's camera. Why he stopped returning phone calls. It was because he completely and utterly, shamefully, disregarded my grandmothers dying wishes and instead, kept it all for himself. He died a couple of years later. No one in our family went to his funeral. Despite having already purchased a double plot and headstone, he did not get buried next to my grandmother. His date of death was never added to the tombstone. We don't bring him flowers or think of him fondly. We simply remember the betrayal. We thought we were family for life, but he decided, 2 years before his death and 2 months after my grandmothers death, that wealth was more important than family; that families are easily replaced -- simply marry a new woman.
And I wonder how our family would be right now if, instead of going down a path of poverty, we had had access to the wealth that should have been ours. Would I be drowning in student debt? Would my mom and aunts live in trailers? Would health issues have been taken care of in a timely fashion? What choices would my cousins have made differently? College instead of drugs or immediate child-bearing? Home buying instead of perpetual rent? Wealth building instead of giving it all away every month?
