Week 31: Large (and its consequences)

I've been busy, that's all I can say.  In addition to the pandemic, we've had a couple of medical events one of which came to nothing and the other resulting in a small surgery on my husband's right elbow the day after tomorrow.  That has meant that I'm doing some of the things my husband normally does which has left me with a little less time and a lot less concentration!  I've dipped into some genealogy every few days but mostly I've left this aside.  But here we are, week 31, "Large", which was supposed to be for July 29 to August 4th!  Hey, I'm only two weeks overdue . . .

But:  Large is a tough topic for me.  We are not large people.  We do not live large.  We do not have large tracts of land or large cars.  It seems like most of the families I'm related to were pretty small, mostly two children, which made my four children look like a big family.  However, my paternal grandfather came from a pretty big family and this led to an interesting problem for at least one of his sons.

So, Grandpa Prewitt, George Claud known always as Claud, was one of at least seven children  I think there were a couple more children in this family but I don't know why I think that as these were people who did not talk about the family.  However, according to the family tree I've managed to assemble so far, Claud was second to the youngest child.  Grandpa was probably born in 1885 in Elsberry, Missouri but no one seems to have kept good records, there was apparently no birth certificate, and of course the 1890 census was mostly destroyed so there is no way to figure out his birth date from that.  Because of the large number of children, no one seems to have paid any formal attention to the year:  my best bet would be to find a family Bible if such existed.

And why do I know that this murkiness about his birthdate exists?  In 1962, my father was hired to work on a construction job for NATO and had to have a security clearance.  It turned out to be very, very difficult to prove that his father had been born in the United States.  Ultimately they must have decided that it was not relevant (or someone just buried the paperwork, we'll never know) because Dad got the job and we ended up living in Italy for a few months at the height of the Cold War.