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A Wedding and a Divorce
The anniversary of my paternal grandparents’ wedding is approaching. Clarence Lee Brill and Josephine DeBaise were married on April 24th, 1935. Now, this event was not something that was actually celebrated by my grandparents anytime during my lifetime, because they had divorced only a few years later. After my grandmother asked my grandfather to leave, my grandfather moved out of Connecticut, enlisted in the US Navy, and eventually remarried and had another son; my grandmother raised my dad as a single mother, though with great assistance from her mother, her many sisters, and even her in-laws. Since the date was not celebrated, it wasn’t even noted or known by many,…
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Happy Birthday, Babci
Last night I was perusing housing listings in my hometown, and I eventually browsed my way over to Google Earth where I looked up the house where my mother and her three sisters had grown up. It was on Blatchley Ave in New Haven – or Fair Haven – Connecticut. This was a modest home, to say the least, a very small house with small rooms and a small backyard, on a street that was not known to be very well-off or safe (I do love understatement). My mother and her sisters grew up quite poor, though both of my grandparents worked very hard in rather arduous jobs. My Grampa…
