I should name my family tree: DYSFUNCTION.
So what happens when your impressionable pre-teen watches you move to a new town and go around telling everyone that your husband is dead?
He’s not. But maybe you couldn’t afford the divorce? Or maybe you have some kind of religious objection to divorce (that doesn’t apply to lying…)
But it’s more than that. It works so well that you just move on again a few years later with a new surname and a new dead husband – this time one that you never married. Or one that never existed…
It must have looked like it was working because when the impressionable teenager grew up and found herself in a family way, she too ended up being the widow of a man who she did not marry, and possibly a man who never actually existed.
And then her daughter…
And her grand daughter…
It just keeps happening, generation after generation.