This weekend I discovered I look exactly like my great grandmother. Mind you, I've always remarked that my mom and I look distinctly alike in childhood pictures (not so much anymore, unfortunately!! She's 5'2....) but this was downright scary.
Apparently when my grandmother's obit was published in her hometown (well, where she grew up, anyway) in the Fox Valley area of Wisconsin (Neenah, Green Bay, Appleton, Kaukauna) distant relatives mailed my aunt a bunch of geneology - resolving a family mystery of sorts.
A little backstory: my grandma, Dorothy Tebo Lindstrom, was an orphan. The story goes that her parents - Blanche Tebo and Mitchell something or other had an illegitimate, partly Native American child - and Blanche was really young. She died at age 24, and so my grandma was hustled around to various people - her Grandma (who was really not her grandma) and the infamous Aunt Maude who was really strict and generally a bitch. Not that my grandma would ever say that, but.... now that I've seen a picture of this woman, I agree that she's pretty scary.
Grandma's history was so sketchy that we didn't even know her real birthday until after she died. Her birth certificate said September 11, but she always claimed it was August 11 (she was right - ha!!). Well, when these relatives mailed my aunt Wendy all this documentation and geneology (including pictures) we discovered that a) we were French and that b) Tebo was really Thibault.
And I'm looking at this woman, the same day I got my hair cut, where my stylist noted that my hair kinda goes one way and waves in that same way. And I'm looking at my great grandmother, Blanche, and I realize her hair (in the 20s flapper style) is cut in a VERY similar way and that her hair's doing the exact same thing that mine does when I try to straighten it without the help of professionals. And that I have her nose, which has always not been a Lindstrom nor a Stevenson nose.
As she always does, my mom gave me some of my grandma's possessions - since we were so close. She gave me this mirror I used to always play with and hold and look at (I didn't tell her that I picked it up EVERY time I went in my grandparents bedroom, regardless of whether I was 4 or 14). And I picked it up this evening, at 12:30 am, when I totally should have been sleeping - and thought, wow. I have more of a history than I thought.
When my aunt mails me all of the family history, I'll go to Ellis Island again. But this time, I'll be armed.
And I'll know why I feel a presence there, when it didn't make sense before.
All sorts of my history are becoming eerily relevant, but that's a blog for another day.
Is it strange that moments like this make me miss Todd?
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