When my grandma's sister passed away around the time my mom was 10 (this was 1982), her husband decided to not really speak to my grandma's side of the family even though my mom and grandma had a really good relationship with their kids (my mom's cousins) and they didn't really communicate with each other as much, and two of their kids ended up becoming pretty well known (one is a chef and the other does stuff with MSNBC) so now I have famous relatives who I only met once when I was 5. They live far away from me and I'm pretty sure they have no idea who I am, and my grandma's sister's husband lives in my state like 30 mins away from me and runs a doctor's office but I have never seen him in my life for the reasons mentioned above. So yeah I have a whole side of my family I don't really know at all. It's also crazy how my mom just casually told me this.
Through that grandparent I'm also related to another bunch of well-known people who came from a town/city in Slovakia according to ancestry.com (back when it was called Austria-Hungary) who likely have no idea of my family's existence but that's a whole different story
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i love having insane family lore like a family member that died on the titanic (she was 3rd class and moving to the us at 21) and a great grandpa who was in a plane that crashed in the wilderness
my grandpa has a whole room full of archives about our family which I feel like I definitely didn't appreciate as a kid but now think is very cool
Nov 9, 2024
here are 3 of my most exciting pieces of lore:
1) my dad was in the south tower on 9/11 and he made it out, but was still in the building when the plane hit. the plane went through his office window, but he was already evacuating and on around the 40th floor when the plane hit
2) my paternal grandfather (jewish) was born in austria but his family moved to milan in ‘33/34 when hitler came into power. in ‘44 when the nazis occupied northern italy, his family escaped into the mountains northeast of milan near bergamo (he was about 13 or 14 years old at this point). his family helped smuggle guns to the partisans since they could speak german with an austrian accent and bypass nazi checkpoints. my grandfather had to shoot a fascist at one checkpoint going wrong, and so at 14 he joined the partisans full-on and lived with them until the war ended. i have a bunch of photos from his time with the partisans (attached some). apparently the group he was specifically with was led by this kinda crazy guy who threatened the security of the whole partisan operations, so he was actually killed by other communist partisans. a few years ago i found a man who researches this exact group in bergamo, and now i have an 80 yr old italian pen-pal who published some photos of my grandfather in his book.
3) my maternal grandfather was orphaned really young in cuba and was really poor. he met my grandmother when he saw her riding her bike down the street and instantly fell in love with her (yes, just like cinema paradiso). she was really rich and her family hated him, so he would wait outside her window just to see her. eventually they get married and have my eldest uncle (because love always perseveres). this part of the story is fuzzy, but i believe he got into some gambling issues and so my grandmothers family shipped him to the US (probably with hopes of getting rid of him for good). but he began to build a life for his family there. then the revolution happened and he continued to go back and forth, but then castro put in the policy that children born in cuba had to stay, so they moved to nyc permanently. but my grandfather loved castro, as most cubans did. so my family is not part of the typical exile cuban-american demographic, which i always found fascinating.
Feb 19, 2024
I just found out I have family still living in Poland (I’m Jewish and I thought that most of my family had left) and I’m so happy to just find out about that and all the interesting things I’ve come across when working with family members to compile this tree
Dec 11, 2024
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My parents told me many times growing up they both love this movie and I finally watched it last year for a class that I took
Oct 17, 2024
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It’s just so nice when people genuinely give a shit about you or your friends and you both want to get to know each other more love people like that
Jul 10, 2024
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There’s been multiple reports of AI taking up lots of energy to generate things and we don’t need more energy being wasted to produce a soulless, computer generated piece of AI art (Idk how others feel about AI art but whenever I look at it I feel sick and my heart sinks because it just feels so empty) so that’s one thing. Another issue is all these horrific deepfake scandals, to an incident that happened to at least 1 girl at the high school I went to (I’m not gonna say their names or anything because they’ve already been through so much shit) to South Korea’s recent crackdown on deepfake p0rn which revealed just how rampant it was throughout the country (and I just know shit like this is happening worldwide it’s not just their country). There’s also social media manipulation, biases in AI (only 100/7,000 of this world’s languages being used in chatbot training which only contributes further to languages being endangered), the very real threat of AI to be used to create more inequality, etc. While it looks like generative AI is flopping in some areas now (thank god) I’m still very concerned about it
Oct 2, 2024