Daniel Richardson – my great-grandfather; Eva’s grandfather
Yesterday my email held a birthday greeting from Eva Richardson Legerer, my cousin in Austria. Fifteen years ago, we didn’t know of one another’s existence. Then, Eva (who was in her fifties, I think) decided to go back to school… and the rest of the story reads like a fairy tale.
As part of her course work, Eva took a genealogy class and, to assist her, her mother gave her a small box of papers that her father had left when he died. At that point, Eva and her sister and brother knew only that her handsome father, Dan Richardson, had been stationed in Vienna just after WWII, had met her mother when he was making a door-to-door search for Displaced Persons, had married her and lived for the rest of his life in Austria. He never spoke of his American family. Not a word.
Eva’s Father, Dan Richardson, 1915
“He must have been ashamed of us,” I told Eva when we finally met. “I think he must have been ashamed of us” was her response. We will probably never know…
Eva found a letter written by my Uncle Edwin to her father in care of the U.S. War Department notifying Dan that his half-sister, Helen Richardson Espy (my grandmother) had died. That was in 1954. Obviously, Dan received the letter but had never responded. On the other hand, he never threw it away. We’ll never know the reason for that, either.
Once Eva made the connection, all manner of things happened. She traveled to Oysterville and spent ten days with us. We traveled to Austria and spent a week with her. We met one another’s mothers and looked at old photographs and letters and shared whatever information we had. Our side of the family knew ‘all’ about Dan-the-boy and Dan-the-young man right up until he joined the service in World War II. Eva and her side of the family knew ‘all’ about Dan-the-adult from the time he met her mother until his death some years ago.
Eva Gaches Richardson, 1915 — Eva Legerer’s grandmother and my great-grandfather’s second wife
Eva retains dual citizenship and is very interested (and concerned) about American politics. She also keeps me informed about things in her part of the world. In yesterday’s email she said, the situation in Europe is getting worse and worse. The number of refugees are frightening people. Germany took 800,000 people last year, the USA is PLANNING on taking 25,000. They pass through Austria, which up to about a month ago has been great in helping, but now our government is under much pressure and giving in to the rightish side, leaving Angela M., who is actually my hero!
Anyway, life has changed here since last summer. Johanna, my daughter, lives in Traiskirchen, a small town next to Baden, where I live, and there is a refugee camp there, which is always overfilled, instead of 800 people (the capacity), there were almost 5000 people there. You can imagine what the situation was like. But very many helped. Now they put the children there that arrive without their families.
I couldn’t help but think about the power of being directly connected… as in reading “the news” directly from Cousin Eva… and about how fragile our connections were… and how the internet has helped…
Ironic that Eva’s father met her mother while looking for refugees. Now the family is seeing a new round of displaced persons and we seem to be repeating history with a new cast of characters. How lovely that she found you!