Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Tell Us about a Favorite Aunt or Uncle

It's nice to branch out to different parts of our family occasionally, as Randy Seaver is having us do this week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music):

(1) Most people have aunts and uncles in their lives — the siblings of their parents, and, in some cases, grandunts and -uncles, the siblings of their grandparents.  Who are/were our favorite aunts and/or uncles?

(2) Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or on Facebook.  Be sure to leave a comment with a link to your blog post on this post.

I have an assortment of aunts and uncles, but somewhat lopsided:  My mother had no sisters, and my father had no brothers.  (Well, technically, my father had a half-brother on his father's side from my grandfather's first wife, but he died as an infant about 10 years before my father was born.  And from her marriage, my grandmother had male twins who were born earlier than that who apparently also died very young.)  In addition to that, my father's family was even more skewed, because of the multiple marriages and relationships that each of my grandparents had, so my father's oldest sister was 21 years older than he, and his youngest 19 years younger.  In total my father had seven half-siblings and no full siblings.  My mother had two brothers and no half-siblings.  I have met almost all of my aunts and uncles who survived to adulthood; I don't believe I ever met my father's oldest sister, Ruth.

And of all those, my favorite is — well, none of them.  My favorite aunt is actually the wife of my mother's brother.

My aunt Mary has always been very loving and welcoming and a lot of fun to be around.  I remember when my family lived in Southern Califoina, Mary came to visit once and took us kids for a fun joyride in a pick-up truck.  She and my uncle were there in Florida to welcome us when we returned to the United States from Australia in 1973.  I think may have stayed with them for a few days before leaving the Miami area to move to the Florida Panhandle.

When I moved from Florida back to Califorina to go to college, I was able to see my aunt somewhat regularly, because she was only a Greyhound bus trip away.  Then, when I moved to the San Francisco area, she was even closer, and I could take a short hour-and-a-half drive and visit.  I saw her (and my uncle!) for holidays, birthdays, when my grandmother visited from Florida, and just to say hi.  I got to know her sisters and visited one of them in Columbus, Ohio several times.  I've become an adjunct member of their family.  I'm still doing research on her family history, too!

And now that I'm thinking about it, why isn't there a single collective noun that includes aunts and uncles?  You can say siblings to mean both brothers and sisters, but there's no equivalent word for aunts and uncldes.  And "piblings" doesn't count.