I got an email recently from my cousin Jacqui, which was a forward from a great uncle of ours named Teddy. Uncle Teddy is the brother of my paternal grandpop (so my dad’s uncle, or my dad’s dad’s brother) and he is the official archivist of the Mulgrew family. This is no small task; my grandfather had 13 brothers and sisters, and he and his wife gave birth to ten children of their own. These are the reasons that despite my massive consumption of Mountain Dew and abuse of prescription pills that I am hopeful that I will, some day, be able to procreate; “Mulgrew” is old Gaelic for either “strong of sperm” or “hairy of body,” depending on which Irish scholar you believe.

(To break it down a little further, growing up my dad had 65 first cousins – on one side of the family. His grandparents, my great-grandparents, had 66 grandchildren. That’s a grandkid’s birthday every 5.5 days. Wowza.)

I’ve only met Uncle Teddy twice. The most recent time was when my dad, brother and I drove cross-country last year and we stopped in AZ to see Uncle Teddy and his wife. He and I shook hands and, sharp old guy he is, he asked me, “Oh, you’re the one that writes that filth?” Yes. Yes, that would me.

The time before that was at a Mulgrew family reunion in Lancaster, PA a few years back. It was a lot of fun, but a strange scene: first cousins of my dad’s generation walking up to their first cousins and saying, “I’m sorry, I know we’re cousins, but I don’t know who you are”, me feeling uncomfortably attracted to people with my last name, etc. The lowlight and highlight of the weekend reunion came very early on when we realized that we were holding a reunion for 150 Irish Catholic people in a dry county (no booze in Lancaster at all, stupid Amish), and my brother and I immediately set out to the next county to buy hundreds of dollars of booze and were subsequently (and quite appropriately) feted as heroes upon our return.

Anyway, the point is that I don’t know Uncle Teddy very well, and the forward that Jacqui sent me was an email from Uncle Teddy with the subject “Descendants of Robert Mulgrew [my grandfather].” Uncle Teddy was doing some Mulgrew Family Tree updating and attached a PDF of my grandpop’s branch of the family tree. Because I don’t know Teddy well, and because neither my brother or my sister know Teddy well, the source of information for our immediate family’s lil’ branch of the tree was my dad, who is not known for being, you know, good with information.

At the top of the Robert Mulgrew Family Tree were my grandmom and grandpop, below them were their ten kids and spouses, and below those were the grandkids and, if applicable, their spouses and children. Every one of my uncles and aunts, my dad’s brothers and sisters, had assiduously filled out biographical information for themselves and their children, listing dates of birth, dates of marriage, including recent pictures, etc. And then there was my dad’s portion of the Robert Mulgrew clan family tree.

First, there were only two pictures for the five of us: one kinda recent one of my dad, and one for my sister from when she was about nine (she’s 23 now). My brother, my mom and myself had no pictures. There were also some other errors:

1) My birthday was wrong. It was listed as July 7, 1979, when it’s really July 17, 1979. Not a big deal and possibly a typo, but worth noting that in the 40+ on this family tree, I was the only one with the wrong birthday. Maybe this has something to do with the filth that I wrote, or my dad just doesn’t know my birthday. A toss-up, really.

2) I am apparently married to a woman named Helene Mullen. This is a little bit bigger of an error, I would say. I’ve never dated a girl named either “Helene” or “Mullen,” I’ve never been engaged, and the most satisfying and long-lasting relationship I’ve ever had was not with a woman but with a sausage. Yet here I am, on the Robert Mulgrew Family Tree, married to Helene Mullen. Sadly, I don’t know if she’s hot or not, since there’s no picture of her, either.

(That would have been terrific, actually – if there was a picture of my “wife” on the tree, but not me, and she looked something like this.)

3) My mom is listed as deceased as of 1992. This…well, this one’s kinda of a big mistake, since my mom is alive and well. My parents got divorced around 1992, but the “d” in this family tree is used clearly for those who are deceased, and there is no mention of divorce between other couples that are divorced.

But it got me thinking: while I don’t think my dad would intentionally write that my mom was dead, perhaps he maybe saw the “d” and thought, “Yeah…you know, we don’t need to correct that”?

Is that possible? Yes. Would it be awesome, in a weird way? A little bit. Is the more likely scenario that my dad either didn’t even look the thing over or the “d” does means “divorced”? Sure. But part of me wants to leave it as it is, and then ask my mom to show up to the reunion. But then again, that moment – her rise from the dead – must surpass my brother and I saving the previous reunion in Mulgrew Family Lore. So I guess I’ll just email Uncle Teddy and tell him to correct it (using as many curse words as possible, of course).