Unknown foreign relatives reveal a brother

by Mitch Fulton

All of my life I had heard stories about my Welsh grandmother and how she had emigrated from Wales as a small child with her parents. As she had died before I was born, the stories of this exotic part of my family always intrigued me. Unlike the other sides of my family who had been in the U.S. for generations, my Welsh side of the family was relatively new to America and they spoke this almost impenetrable language of Welsh, lovingly referred to by the Welsh as the language of heaven. When I went off to Kalamazoo College in the late 70s one of the key parts of the curriculum was foreign study in your junior year. There was no established exchange program with the University of Wales so if I wanted to study in Wales I had to make it happen on my own, by applying and being accepted to the University for a full academic year. I was determined to make this happen and to re-discover my roots. Alex Haley’s book and the TV miniseries, “Roots”, had both recently impacted my life and I wanted to have a similar experience.

My University application was accepted at the very last moment and I contacted my grandmother’s first cousin in upstate New York who had been the only link between my Welsh-American relatives and the cousins in the old country. She dutifully provided me with my relatives contact information complete with little biographic notes about the cousins. I quickly wrote to several of the cousins (the ones that seemed to have children that might be close to my age) and told them of my plans, promising to make contact with them once I arrived. Off I went in September of 1978, deciding to live in the one Welsh speaking dormitory so I could immerse myself in the language and hopefully learn this very odd Celtic language.

I arrived in Bangor, North Wales and settled into the dorm and made contact with my relatives. That first weekend, one of my cousins arrived with her husband in tow and offered to whisk me away to their home for the weekend. They had a son a couple of years younger than I, but he didn’t come with them to meet me. My cousin, Eirlys, seemed like a very nice woman and was on the Board of Regents for the University. So after we met at the dorm, she took it upon herself to address the students that were milling about the lobby of the dorm in Welsh. I didn’t understand anything other than my name but I soon learned that she was explaining who I was and why I was there and to treat me well. Needless to say I was beyond embarrassed and wished she had not decided to do that sort of an introduction.

Fortunately we left shortly thereafter and I didn’t have to dwell on my embarrassment for too long. We arrived at their home in about a half an hour and I met my cousin Jonathan for the first time. His first words to me were, “We don’t have any peanut butter in the house and I thought you’d be wearing cowboy boots.” That sort of odd encounter led to a great and life-long friendship. We were together almost every weekend that year either at his parents’ home or at the dorm. We took many train trips to London, Chester and Liverpool. I met his high school friends and he met my new College friends and we discovered that we really liked each other. Like me he was an only child and craved a family experience with someone he could really relate too. Our brotherhood has endured over the years and we have remained close and in each others’ lives for the past thirty years. He and his wife immigrated to Canada about 17 years ago. At the time that they emigrated his mother told me that he did so to be closer to me. The deep hospitality that I experienced with these unknown relatives enriched my life in a way that I could never have anticipated. I felt blessed at the time because I knew I was realizing my dream but I could not have seen how the Spirit was revealing not just a brother but a complete second family. While it is true that we were related to one another, we started that year as total strangers and ended it as a true family.

“Unknown foreign relatives reveal a brother.”