The Story of Finding a Relative I Shouldn't Have on X

While I was busy ego-searching, I found this post.

"Yu Okada from Omocoro" refers to me. The person tweeting is an account called "Migration Plan" with 30,000 followers, and they have posted many photos of stylish interiors. Since they wrote that they have lived for 26 years, I assume they are 26 years old.

However, I don't have any 26-year-old relatives.

And for that matter, I don't have any relatives who are experts in stylish interiors either.

Is this person mistaken? Or, since they wrote "I just found out," perhaps there is a hidden, distant blood relation.

Contacting the relative(?) I found on X

I was curious, so I sent a DM to that Migration Plan account.

I asked in a vague way because it was difficult to ask questions that could identify an individual to an anonymous account like Migration Plan.

Then, I received a reply immediately.

The name of the person grayed out and redacted looked familiar. If I recall correctly, this person is my grandmother's younger brother...in other words, my great-uncle. From here on, I will call this great-uncle "Uncle Take (pseudonym)."

I have met Uncle Take only once. I only knew of his existence until then, but about two years ago, he suddenly contacted me. It seems he heard about me from a relative and invited me to dinner. He was a sociable person who drank a lot and talked a lot.

The fact that Uncle Take's name came up increased the credibility that Migration Plan is my relative. I never imagined I would find a real relative on X.

However, the DM that Migration Plan sent next was strange.

In Migration Plan's message, it was written, "Uncle Take is my grandmother's younger brother." However, Uncle Take should also be "my grandmother's younger brother" to me as well.

I was confused for a moment, thinking, 'Migration Plan and my grandmother are the same!? The same grandmother!?' but when I organized it in a diagram, I realized it was a possible story.

The possibility that my grandmother and Migration Plan's grandmother are sisters.

In other words, Uncle Take is the younger brother of both my grandmother and Migration Plan's grandmother. It's the first time I've heard that my grandmother had a sister, but it seems people of that generation had many siblings, so I probably just didn't know about it.

Even so, to find a distant relative on X. It seems that even a broken SNS has a use for "finding relatives."

Just to be sure, I asked my mother on LINE if my grandmother had any sisters.
In the first place, I had only met Uncle Take once, and I wasn't 100% sure that he was my grandmother's younger brother, so I decided to start by confirming that.

She replied, "That's right." Good. So Uncle Take really was my grandmother's younger brother.

However, the rest of her message surprised me.

(My grandmother) was the eldest daughter and had six younger brothers below her.

Six of them? That's too many.

But the point to note isn't that, but the fact that it says "younger brothers". Wait, what about sisters? This makes my previous hypothesis invalid.

Just to be sure, I'll check one more time.

My grandmother has no sisters.

What does this mean? If my grandmother has no sisters, then who is Iju Keikaku-san's grandmother? Could my grandmother and Iju Keikaku-san's grandmother actually be the same person!? Is that even possible?

I continued the conversation with my mother on LINE, but I couldn't find out any more details.

The "grandmother's sister" who shouldn't exist

If it's come to this, the fastest way is to ask Uncle Take. After all, Uncle Take was the reason Iju Keikaku-san found out about me in the first place. Uncle Take is the key person in this mysterious family tree.

……However, it was somehow hard to ask. I've only met Uncle Take once, and we aren't on the kind of terms where we can easily contact each other. Plus, it's hard to explain. After all, I still hadn't asked for Iju Keikaku-san's real name.
For example, on the web media "Omocoro" mentioned at the beginning, most writers work anonymously. Even if you're on friendly terms in private, it's normal not to know each other's real names. In fact, there's an atmosphere where asking for a real name is almost taboo, so I had become completely accustomed to that common sense.
If I were certain we were relatives, I could ask, but there's still a possibility that Iju Keikaku-san is a total stranger."It's precisely because they are a relative candidate found on the internet that it's hard to ask"—that was the problem standing in my way. It's a problem that probably no one would empathize with.

I decided to try drawing out all the possible family trees based on the information I had obtained so far. It was like a puzzle.

I couldn't solve it at all.

What is the relationship between Iju Keikaku-san's grandmother and my grandmother?

As dark clouds gathered, a breakthrough was found in an unexpected place.The previous LINE message with my motherheld the hint.
I had been fixated on the fact that "there are no sisters," but the LINE message contained another important fact.

In other words, after Grandma's mother passed away, her father remarried, and Grandma became the stepchild and older sister to Uncle Take—isn't that what happened?

There seems to be a clue here to solve the mystery. Could it be that the family tree became complicated because Grandma was a stepchild? Perhaps because it's so complex, even my mother doesn't know, but was there actually someone who was Grandma's younger sister?

Thinking this, as I continued to exchange messages with my mother, she suddenly seemed to remember.

“There was one daughter from the stepmother (Grandma's father's second wife).”

!!!

It's unclear why my mother had forgotten until now, and I don't know why she insisted that “she wasn't Grandma's younger sister,” but could this “daughter” who just appeared be the grandmother of the person planning to migrate!?

It's getting more and more complicated, so let's organize it.

If I draw it as a family tree, would it look like this?

I was excited, as if I were solving a mystery. Several hours passed as I kept drawing the family tree, and the clock had ticked past midnight.

For now, I'll try to convey the information I've gathered so far to the person planning to migrate. I attached a handwritten family tree to a long message and sent it via DM. Then, I got a reply immediately.

In it, further new facts were written.

“They only had the grandmother as a child, but it seems they remarried and took in a stepchild.”

...Huh???

Does that mean the grandmother of the person planning to migrate was also a stepchild?

My grandmother and the grandmother of the person planning to migrate—does that mean both were stepchildren!?

Oh no. I'm getting confused.

I, who had been drawing the family tree in a trance, gave in to the ever-expanding amount of information and decided to go to sleep to clear my head.

From the next day on, I and the Migration Planner continued to share memories as we each asked our mothers about the past. It seems that as my mother talked, she began to remember various things little by little.
Partway through, the conviction that 'we must be some kind of relatives' grew stronger, so I asked for the names of the Migration Planner and their family. Compiling that information and creating a family tree became my daily routine. What do you mean your daily routine is a family tree?

Finally, by my mother going to my grandmother's house and hearing the story directly, the whole picture was finally revealed.

There was a long story there.

The Story of the Family Tree

More than 80 years ago, during the war. My grandmother, who lived in Manchuria at the time, lost her mother when she was 15. It seems it was tuberculosis. My grandmother took care of her four young younger brothers as a mother substitute.

And in the same era, the Migration Planner's grandmother had also lost her father.

A few years later, 'my grandmother's father,' who had returned to Japan, met 'the Migration Planner's grandmother's mother' and remarried. Both of them were remarrying.

At this time, my grandmother entered the family as a stepchild.However, the Migration Planner's grandmother did not become a stepchild and remained at her mother's parents' house.It seems it was decided that it would be better that way since she was living with relatives and was still young.
In other words, at this point, my grandmother and the Migration Planner's grandmother were not living together.

After that,Uncle Take was born between the two who remarried.Uncle Take, who was thought to be the key person, finally makes his appearance. My grandmother and Uncle Take were half-siblings, but my grandmother took good care of Uncle Take just as she did her own younger brothers.

And as time passed,the Migration Planner's grandmother, who had become a high school student, arrived late as a stepchild (adopted).The circumstances are unknown, but it seems she became a stepchild with a time lag.
With this, my grandmother, Uncle Take, and the Migration Planner's grandmother all became siblings.

However,by that time, my grandmother had already married and left the house.So they didn't live together, and even though they were sisters on the family register, the recognition of her as a 'younger sister' was thin.
That was why my motherthought that 'Grandmother had no younger sister'.The 'time lag in becoming stepchildren' was what made the family tree more complicated.

To summarize the above, it looks like this.

I-it's too complicated...
But it was finally completed.

My grandmother and the Migration Planner's grandmother were indeed sisters, and both were Uncle Take's older sisters.

And the Migration Planner and I were relatives.

On the family tree, the relationship is 'the grandchild of my grandmother's younger sister'... in other words,'second cousins'. Since our grandmothers were stepchildren to each other, we are not blood-related, but legally, we are proper relatives within the sixth degree of kinship.

As we talked further, it turned out that my mother and Iju-Keikaku-san's mother used to play together when they were little. They were saying things like, "Oh, [Name]-chan! That brings back memories." If they had remembered that at the start, we would have solved it right away!

However, it seemed that once my mother remembered one thing, she remembered another, and as a result of this domino effect of memories, the recollection finally came back. It was the same for my grandmother; as she talked, she remembered all sorts of things as if a dam had broken. The hardships of losing her parents at a young age, the grueling experience of the repatriation from Manchuria, and conversations between step-siblings. The dots of reminiscence were connected into lines, just like a family tree.

The family tree, which I had started solving like a mystery, was also a long genealogy of memories.

Meeting the relative I found on X

Once the family tree was complete, I wanted to meet Iju-Keikaku-san. I gathered my courage and suggested it, and received a reply saying they would love to. And when we tried to decide on a place to meet, it turned out that Iju-Keikaku-san lives just a few stations away from my nearest station. I never expected to have a relative living in the neighborhood. It's so close that I feel like we must have passed each other in town at least once.

So, we met up.

This is my relative, Iju-Keikaku-san.

I was nervous about our first meeting and worried about running out of things to talk about, so I brought my three-year-old child along. But that worry was unfounded; as we talked about the family tree, we hit it off immediately and had a great time discussing work, interior design, and family stories. I recommend using a family tree as an icebreaker.

Iju-Keikaku-san had lived their life thinking, "I don't have any relatives," and told me, "I'm happy to know the fact that I have a relative." That made me happy, too. Even though we aren't blood-related, there is a sense of security in just having a distant relative nearby. Who would have thought that a social network connected on X would turn into a family network? We talked about such things while our blood-related child sat between us. When the pizza the child was biting into pulled a long string of cheese, we all laughed.

On the way home, just as we were talking about meeting up next time with Uncle Take included, my child declared, "Poop," so we hurriedly disbanded. I ran to a public restroom and managed to make it just in time. When I stepped outside, many people were crossing the intersection.

Blood, genealogy, social graphs. Even in a world that looks full of strangers, there must be many hidden connections lurking. From that person, and from this person, thin threads of relationships, like pizza cheese, might be stretching out.

Holding my child's hand and passing by strangers, I thought about the family tree I had yet to see.