My mother came from her dad’s second family. His first one all died except for one daughter.
My Grandma Edith died in it leaving my Mom bereft, and her brother and three other older sisters motherlesss. Grandpa Charles could not handle raising the five alone, so Mom, then three, and Uncle Earl the youngest were placed by Social Services as foster children, and eventually adopted by their new caretakers.
Even in such circumstances, God works in wondrous ways. Mom was taken from her birth situation and placed with a godly, caring new Mom and Dad, and received the best kind of affection and pious Methodist upbringing that Grandpa Charles would not have offered her.
Mom finished high School with high grades, and was sent to a fine Wesleyan College. There she met and influenced my Dad, who entered the Methodist ministry, receiving a B. A. and subsequently B. Div. in three years of seminary.
Ultimately, when she was widowed, my adoptive kindly Grandma came to live with us, profoundly impacting my own formative years.
That is, on account of the pervasive "Spanish" flu, God used it to organize my Mom's life, gave her an outstanding, faithful, fine husband, and with him, me. But also because of it, my maternal heritage was never a mystery. Grandpa Charles and his second wife Clara never forgot Mom or me, either, through the following years.
I exist because of the Spanish flu, for which I am eternally grateful, as I am of God's continuing and protecting watch care over me.