My Grandfather

I put together - a long time ago - an album dedicated to my parents for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. It took a very long time to put together back in the day when I was using a desktop computer and the software for photos and digitalart was in its infancy. The primary program I used was Picture It. After many iterations and hours it all finally came together. The first part was highlighting where my mom and dad came from. I didn’t know my dad’s parents at all. They died long before I was born. I knew my mom’s parents only for a short time. What I did know was that three of my grandparents were Polish. And they all came to the US in the early 1900’s through Ellis Island. I tried to locate information about them when the website first came out. I remember asking my parents questions about what they remembered and how the names might have been spelled. We found most information on my Polish side. My dad’s father was born in Ukraine. His last name was actually Ivanciu but it was changed to Ivancin when he too passed through Ellis Island. He was a musician of sorts and played the horn. It’s one of the only images we have of him and it used to hang in my aunt’s tiny apartment. He died tragically falling off a ladder before my dad was eighteen years old - when he joined the Coast Guard. All I know is that my dad’s family was very poor and he rarely talked about it. We have a photo of my dad standing in front of a Christmas tree with candles, wearing a buster brown haircut, with a single toy in his hand. So the events of the day have me thinking a lot about my grandfather from the Ukraine. I have a connection to it through him. 

A Resemblance to Tcheky Karyo?

We love British tv and movies. We have an Acorn subscription, and have never missed a PBS Masterpiece Theater. Primarily we watched the classics, but over the last many years we watched them all - including the mysteries. Of late, there is a Julien “Baptiste” program playing - a spin-off of “The Missing,” which we hadn’t seen. While watching that, my husband searched for other shows the main character, Tcheky Karyo has been in. We aren’t enamored by this particular show, but the reviews for “The Missing” series were good, and there were several actors in them that we are very familiar with. So the last couple of weeks we watched both shows with eight episodes each. The Julien character started looking very familiar to my husband - especially when he shaved his head. The ears and general features reminded him of his father. He had “lighter” eyes based on Iranian standards, as did this character. So we took a couple of photos and made them black and white and sent them to our son, asking if he knew who this person was? He said it might be him in a couple of years. Then we resent the real photo who resembled the character and asked if he knew who that was (he had only seen him at a very young age). He responded “my grandfather.” It sounded funny because he always calls his father “Pops.” The resemblance was striking and my husband still can’t get over it. So we didn’t fool him, but it was another bit of trivia. We like watching tv in the evening because it reminds us of how we lived “before” and takes our minds off whatever might be bothering us now. so much for Julien Baptiste.