Life With Boys

OK — I’m a little weirded out ’cause the pieces are slowly coming together.

A little background — my Mom was born to James Leonard Solomon and AraBelle Fuller Solomon Zeimet in 1945. James and AraBelle divorced not long after the war ended and later my Grandma married the milkman, Peter Zeimet. Peter raised my mom and had two additional kids with my Grandma.

My Mom never knew James as her father, and it’s questionable if that was his choice or my Grandma’s, not that it matters now. When my Mom was 20ish she hired a private investigator to find her father. She and her college roommate drove out to see him (but that’s about as much of the story as I know). My Mom didn’t find out James had died until a few months after his death when his wife found evidence of her and our family hidden in the safe at his office. I know my Mom met his wife Vera May in Florida. I was too young to know what questions to ask, to ask if she learned anything about him.

I have no idea if Vera let her family in on the fact that my Mom existed or even if she is still alive.

With the help of my cousin Robyn we have tracked down this obituary so I have a place to start if I want to “let the cat out of the bag” myself. I haven’t decided yet.

For now I’m going to just keep plugging along, scanning everything under the sun it seems, and hoping to get finished with this scanning part soon.

What I’m really trying to find out is if there were other children between James and AraBelle (I think there were — but many records from the 1940s aren’t digitized yet.) I think there was a baby in Hawaii before my Mom, a boy named James, who is buried in the “Punchbowl” and a little girl, Cheryl (after my Mom in 1945) buried near the children’s hospital in Glendale California (according to my Uncle) or maybe twins in Hawaii (according to my Aunt).

I also want to know where my Grandma’s sister ended up. From what I understand she and my Grandma were given away to another family member but then my Grandma was taken back in. As far as I know they were never in contact, but I could be totally off on that one also.

I continue to search the records at www.ancestry.com and have found out quite a bit, but patience is the key as more and more is added everyday.

Enough for now, time to move on with the present and investigate the past a little later.