Karen noted that my birth certificate should list the name off my mother. It does not; my step-mother had it legally removed when she adopted me. But I know her name and some other details (very few) about her and hired someone to confirm the names of her parents etc and give me leads on her siblings (all of whom are not deceased). Thanks for this, Karen. The nanny who rocked my cradle for the first four years sent me a Kodak negative of her when I was in college (she got my address from my father) and a handful of letters about her employment. When I say that I do not know who my mother is, I meant that from a more visceral and experiential and information-based perspective. I know that she was a Scots-Irish woman born to an insurance salesman in Pittsburgh, that she married some other fellow and had a son by him who went on to become a Marine who served in Korea and was disabled but served as a trainer in the Rangers, and I have some contradictory information about why she died. (Common in that era from a medical POV.). It is odd when one-half of one's parentage us roiled up and put into a lockbox.
I will take some time and go through the records I have and fill in more detail about her parents and my father and his parents.
