Are you my (great-great grand) mother?

I miss that book. Lately it's been all Cinderella, all the time, around here. Although I have at least convinced the Kraken that Cinderella Skeleton is worth a read or two.

Long time readers will remember the death of my grandmother last January and a mystery that I alluded to at that time. The leaving of said grandmother from home at age 13, and the subsequent refusal of that same grandmother to tell those of us who descended from her anything about that decision, or about her family. We have recently discovered that even the name she gave us as her own may have been a lie.

Why does a 13 year old girl leave home and never look back? We still don't know, but my aunt's desperate desire to know the truth now that Grandma is gone has led to some new pieces of information. I have to hand it to her - she's tenacious, and she knows how to work the geneology websites. After over a year of looking, and consulting with state offices, Social Security, and everyone else besides, we have arrived at this photograph:



She is (we think) my grandmother's paternal grandmother, and Grandma went with her father to live with her after the death of her own mother at age 3, in a collision with a train. Grandma was almost certainly in the car when this happened, so it's possible that she watched her own mother die, at almost the age the Kraken is now. Horrible to contemplate. Almost impossible to believe this woman is not related to Grandma. When I opened the image on my computer, my mother and I did the same thing 3000 miles apart; frame that face with our fingers to make the shape that Grandma's face had in later years. And gasp with shock. They are her eyes. It's unmistakeably her nose, her mouth. I will be stunned if she is not ours.

This is all we know thus far, but it's the closest thing to a real lead we've had. One more piece of paperwork through the mail and we will know for sure. What then? Will anyone be left alive that knows the story?