Loose Leaf Notes

It was a joyful meeting of first cousins-once-removed that we never knew we had, until DNA results at Ancestry dot com revealed our mutual history. 

The meet-up was a lively one with several conversations going on at once. Someone joked to the waitress that it was a board meeting, and I imagine we were entertaining to the other diners there on a golf tournament day.

We compared notes and resemblances and told WWII stories. We were all amazed at how much my father (the youngest of 11 Redmans) looked like our cousins’ biological father, the undisclosed child of my father’s brother John B. (Jackie) who died in the Philippines as a POW during the brutal Bataan Death March.

That’s my cousin Bill holding a picture of John B., his biological grandfather, who was my father’s brother and my uncle who died before I was born.  Bill and his siblings are heartened in the knowledge that their father was raised by his mother and her husband’s loving family, their family. They had no idea that their father’s father was actually a Redman. Neither did the Redmans. A few of us heard a whispered story in the mid-80s that John B may have fathered a child, and then we discovered our matched DNA about a year ago and both sides of the family have been putting the stories and pieces together since.

Another twist to the story was that my grandfather’s father, Charles Redman, was really Oscar Lundquist. He stowed away on ship from Stockholm Sweden to America as a teenager, and when a shipmate named Charles Redman died he took over his job and papers and entered the U.S. as Charles Redman. My last name should have been Lundquist! Our new cousins have that same Swedish marker.

After lunch, we went to the Redman family home in North Quincy where John B, my father and the rest of the 11 Redman siblings were raised. It was a grand old house before the last of the Redman family died and the house was sold and then fell into disrepair.

The Redman family home was just blocks from Wollaston Beach.

It feels good to know that the Redmans and Bill’s family were friends. We have the old pictures that show those connections. We miss them all.

Thanks to my cousin Patty, the master geology sleuth who couldn’t make it to the meet-up, and to my cousin Gerry (far left above) who toured us around and, like Patty and I, had some oral history pieces of the puzzle to add. Thanks also to Joe who took some great pictures.