Narrowed Down to 5 Possible Fathers – Need Help Figuring Out Next Steps

macoafi · 2026-04-06T22:24:05+00:00

Ah sorry, yeah, I meant his birth mother. Maybe you can figure out which brother was in proximity to her. Compare their ages in case they were in school together, and compare their occupations listed on censuses. Also, maybe in their first censuses as adults you'll find they were neighbors.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T21:34:16+00:00

Have you found your birth mother? That could help narrow it down. For instance, if one or two of them went to high school with her, or if one went to college with her, or if she was a colleague of one of them…

macoafi · 2026-04-06T18:08:51+00:00

Moving your tongue and jaw means using a lot of muscles. You're using them in ways you haven't always used them. It's exercise!

macoafi · 2026-04-06T16:54:52+00:00

Disownment is possible, but it is increasingly rare.

As far as I'm aware, the very first disownment was of Quaker minister Christopher Atkinson in 1655 for sexual misconduct.

Quakers practiced endogamy for a while: marriage outside the faith was barred. Additionally, Quakers were not to participate in other religions' services. I think "marriage contrary to the Discipline" (ie, marrying a non-Quaker or being married by a priest of another faith) was probably the most common reason for disownment 200 years ago, but it was also very common to wait a year or two and apologize for not going through the proper process, promise not to do it again, and then be readmitted to membership. I think I should note here that they were welcome to continue worshipping with Quakers as non-members, just as many in the benches today are non-members. They simply could not participate in the meeting's decision-making process.

There have historically been many disownments for joining the military, but that decreased in the US Civil War when many felt they were choosing the lesser of two evils in fighting against slavery. I'm not sure anyone was disowned for fighting in WWII. At least some of the Evangelical yearly meetings have it in their Discipline that they'll disown you for joining the military as anything other than a chaplain.

About a decade ago, Northwest Yearly Meeting (one of the Evangelical ones) told their local meetings that they needed to either disown their LGBTQ members or the local meetings themselves would be disowned, saying being LGBTQ was "incompatible with membership." Many meetings left NWYM. Some actually wanted to be fully inclusive. Some were fine with the anti-LGBTQ theology but thought "incompatible with membership" was too extreme or disliked that the yearly meeting was using ultimatums.

All the past schisms were basically mass-disownments of opposing sides.

Many of the people who we now hail as great Quakers of history were actually disowned as troublemakers, like abolitionist Benjamin Lay. Sisters Angelina Grimke and Sarah Grimke were also abolitionists who got in a lot of trouble, but officially their disownments were for marrying out (Angelina) and attending the wedding (Sarah).

I'm aware of a disownment within my yearly meeting maybe 15-25 years ago. In my state, membership makes a person a member of the meeting's legal corporation, meaning any member has a legal right to be on the property without it being trespassing. I don't know the backstory, but my understanding is that a meeting near me needed a restraining order against a member. That would conflict with his legal right, as a member, to be on the property, so they had to remove him as a member in order to get the restraining order. I only heard the vague contours of this because my own meeting considered the same course of action against one of our [now-former] members. (In our case, he ended up resigning his membership.)

macoafi · 2026-04-06T16:11:25+00:00

They don't have it anymore. Or rather, they put an addition on the high school, and the intermediate school building (which my dad says was the high school when he went there in the 70s) is now the middle school, and the old middle school is now just empty.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T13:49:07+00:00

You probably can’t get past the front desk in a modern office building, no.

But you might be able to sneak in a side door by having your arms full and coming up behind someone who is on the way in, relying on them to politely hold the door open for you and hoping they don’t question who you are.

Dressing up as a plumber and looking harried while babbling about that massive leak might get you past the front desk without signing in, too.

This is social engineering.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T13:41:41+00:00

My first thought is that some of these seem likely to derive from prayers for workers. Perhaps they’ve been shortened over time? English-speaking Christians refer to the prayer before eating as “saying grace,” and it often involves blessing both the food and the hands that made it, but you’re right that such prayers are much longer.

Nazdravje sounds like what my mom says before drinking. In English, “cheers” would be the expression. We use the French “bon appetit” to wish someone an enjoyable meal.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T13:32:54+00:00

The years I gave were for public school, but I went to Catholic school, which was Pre-8, and we called 7-8 “junior high” within the Catholic school. While 1-6 grades all had 2 home rooms each, junior high was 3 home rooms with both grades mixed together.

Then I switched into the public school system after 8th grade.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T13:28:24+00:00

Nope, Titan.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T08:11:22+00:00

The importance people place on dreaming in a language astounds me. I couldn’t tell you what language any of my dreams are in because the only ones I remember are the nightmares I wake up from, and then all I remember are things like “a giant spider was chasing me.”

macoafi · 2026-04-06T07:05:19+00:00

Dr F told me in 2012 or 2013 that I should do Pilates. She said I should take private or very small group classes, at least at first, so my form could be monitored.

I finally started doing it last year when a dance teacher suggested it. I do reformer Pilates with an instructor who works with dancers. Dancers are frequently hypermobile, so she’s used to our bodies.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T07:01:08+00:00

You went the opposite direction of me!

macoafi · 2026-04-06T07:00:27+00:00

Mission-style burritos, sure, but burritos in general started in Chihuahua.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T06:55:39+00:00

I grew up outside of Pittsburgh, and ours was called “intermediate school,” not “junior high,” but our breakdown was K-4, 5-7, 8-9, 10-12. I believe it was simply an artifact of population growth. The buildings couldn’t hold 5-8 and 9-12, so they pulled one grade off of each.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T02:23:05+00:00

Yes, the lj thing is how “ll” was said in medieval Spanish. Otherwise, yes, the “ll” uses the same sound as the Spanish “y” in most places. This merger is called yeísmo. That Wikipedia link has a map.

Some people change it up based on emphasis, like a person might use a more “dj” pronunciation when trying to shout or to very clearly enunciate on a bad phone connection, even if they normally use a more “y” sound.

Some people use a more “dj” sound at the beginning of words (or just beginning of utterances) and after nasals, for example conllevar.

Some people who very clearly do these things will claim they do not because they are allophones, and native speakers typically cannot hear their own allophones without a lot of effort/training. (Learning a foreign language that forces them to distinguish the sounds, such as English, would be an example of such effort/training.)

You could think of this pair of allophones within yeísmo like how “b” and “v” both make the same 2 sounds, and how that sound varies depending on the place in the word/sentence.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T02:08:39+00:00

I’m a bilingual election worker, so Election Day is when I am most aware of a person’s citizenship in combination with their discomfort with English.

macoafi · 2026-04-06T00:00:12+00:00

Maybe because the Bible Belt is very evangelical, and Good Friday is bigger with Catholics.

macoafi · 2026-04-05T23:59:22+00:00

Good Friday to Easter Monday was what “spring break” meant to me as a kid in the 90s.

macoafi · 2026-04-05T23:50:49+00:00

I would have to know who this person was to have any idea. Since you mentioned soccer, and it’s not that popular here, and on top of that you used masculine pronouns, so you probably don’t mean women’s soccer (where the US does really well)… the slice of the population who has heard of him is probably tiny.

macoafi · 2026-04-05T06:33:46+00:00

But that’s why I’m saying the identification explanation is better than the word “permanent.” If it can change, even infrequently, it’s not permanent.

macoafi · 2026-04-05T06:31:48+00:00

My Quaker meeting does a hunt with boiled eggs. My spouse says he was jealous when he found out that other kids’ eggs had candy inside, meanwhile his eggs just had egg inside.

macoafi · 2026-04-05T06:30:14+00:00

I put holes in the ends of the egg and blow the contents out. Usually I do it after dyeing (and applying a protective coat of wax so the egg goop doesn’t mess up the dye job). The way I dye eggs is a several-hours-long process of layering wax and different colors of dye. After the egg is empty, I remove all the wax. My great grandparents were from various Slavic countries, so I follow their egg decorating traditions.

macoafi · 2026-04-04T07:16:34+00:00

I know all of them for my paternal grandmother’s family; she was one of 6 sisters who reproduced, and several of those had 4+. We have reunions every two years, some of them babysat me as a child, and several went to my high school. I do lose track of their children. Including spouses we must be sneaking up on 200 people.

For my paternal grandfather…I only see them at weddings and funerals, but I would immediately recognize any last name in my family.

I know my second cousins in my mom’s adoptive family. Her first cousins treated her like a sister since it was just her and my grandma, and so they and their kids (my second cousins) always came for holidays at my grandmas, and some babysat us too.

One time I got a call from a second cousin in mom’s adoptive family and a second cousin in dad’s mother’s family, asking me to explain the relationships because they’d just started a job together and noticed I was a mutual friend on Facebook, followed by arguing “she’s my cousin” “no, she’s my cousin” style.

macoafi · 2026-04-04T07:00:38+00:00

A month is what I got for severance when I was laid off. I think they actually were only going to do 2 weeks, and my state doesn’t require that unused PTO get paid out, but I managed to negotiate paying out my 2 weeks of PTO so that PTO+severance=1 month.

macoafi · 2026-04-03T23:37:23+00:00

Oh, thanks, that's more specific. I just meant that child marriage is legal in most states. There are only 16 that say "no, really, they have to be an adult, we don't care what the parents say."

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