A Known History

"He has a known history of being crazy, and carries a gun under the seat of his car..."

So went one highly memorable quote from a police report, filed by one family member, against certain other family members, on a Christmas morning some years ago. A quote that has become quite famous and passed around often among us.

    "Yeah, and? That might be true, but what's your point?" is the general punchline given in response, whenever anyone brings it up.

I've thrown together this little website to document that and who knows how many other amusing little fragments of family history. In part this is just an effort to get this stuff organized myself. If anyone else finds a few minutes of entertainment in it, even better. I can't imagine that anyone outside of our massive extended family will be interested - but then again, who knows.

I'm calling it "A Known History," because of that classic quote, but also because it ties in with what this is: it will never be the definitive history nor anything close to a complete one. It is only the known history of this family, whatever partial glimpses that I - with some help from others - have been able to piece together. 

Actually, that's not completely true, either. These are only the memories that bring a smile to our faces. My intention is to give everyone a happy place they can go to and revisit our past, hopefully arranged in a decent chronological order as this site gets a little more organized over time. There's nothing but good times, here - after all, even that incident with the police report is something we can mostly all laugh about now.

If you're a little confused about who's who, sorry, but there's probably not much I can do about that. Like I said, this is a huge family, especially when considering the steps and the halves and the in-laws and so forth. One crucial piece of the decoder key, though, is probably explaining what is meant by "Dad" and "my parents" on these pages.

    It occurred to me at a party a few years ago that people were puzzled because I had mentioned two completely different things as far as what my Dad did for a living. I'm so used to doing so that it doesn't even occur to me to explain that I'm talking about two completely different people. 

    This is a dicey subject, to be sure. Someone is bound to be offended, probably, however I phrase this. And I likely would be, too, in their shoes. But here goes:

1. Dad/Dad M = original dad

2. Dad/Dad K/Stepdad/maybe Pops or "my driver" or other amusing euphemisms = subsequent dad

3. My parents = Mom and #2, at least during the years this blog covers thus far

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