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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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This one is hard for me because my first wife's biological dad was from a family of ... and I can't even say it. My wife used to say "gypsy," and her family all said gypsies, but I can't say "Romani" either because they weren't technically Romani. The family came from Europe via South America and are a large isolated family up and down the US eastern coast. Most of the rulers of this family clan are wanted by the FBI, and they are involved in everything from penny bunko scams to psychic parlors to carnivals and crooked contracting companies. My late wife's family have been on a lot of TV shows since the 1970s, including 60 minutes and several specials on cable TV channels like Discovery. Everyone called them gypsies.
My wife died before the term "gypsy" started to be recognized as a slur, and I am curious how she would have handled it, because people used to ask her, "Oh Romani?" "No." "Irish Traveler?" "No, they are the Ristick/Ely clan." "... what?" But let me tell you, that family was very weird. Some of them still lived in vardas but most were circulating through private residences in common suburban neighborhoods. They were real hard to catch and pin down because almost all the top family members had multiple aliases, moved around a lot, and even my wife's dad had several marriages, and claimed the kids on his taxes for decades, even if they were in their 30s (which is a problem my wife had to deal with, like having to tell the IRS, "No, I am 33 and married, I not 8 living with my dad in eastern Ohio."). They have a very specific philosophy about their family as "chosen people" who were, as one story goes, forgiven by God because they stole one of the nails from the cross used to crucify Jesus. They don't even consider what they do fraud or stealing any more than you or I would think a monkey owns a camera. I was married to her for 25 years, and heard all sorts of stories about that family, and why my mother-in-law ended up leaving.
Here's an article from 1997 about them.
I did a Google search on the Ristick family and saw a comment you made on Ars Technica Forums, back when you were Punk Walrus and your wife was alive. (At least given the similarity to username and background, I think it's you.) My condolences on your wife. Did her death bring her father's side of the family back into the picture at all? And did she end up writing the book everyone wants to read about the situation? They sound like a fascinating, but exhausting family. I'd think you'd need a robust journalism team to conduct all those interviews.
It is me.
Nope. Her death brought a LOT of people to the funeral, but mostly people she influenced through the anime and science fiction conventions she helped run. I won't rule out her family showing up, but there were 250-300 people in attendance, and obviously I was distracted. She never wrote a book, but she did leave a some... let's say artefacts... of her family. A tarot deck, a book about family life in the early 1900s, and stuff like that. I don't know what to do with them, because I know some of them were stolen, and someone "outside the family" are not supposed to have them. She was never accepted as a "half breed," and part of why her mother left was because of the abuse. I remember hearing about when someone in the family dies, people just "show up" without being notified. It may be apocryphal, legendary without much fact, I dunno. But it was one of those "psychic things" that her family supposedly possessed.
I do know that she found out that her father died (really died this time, not faked his death) around 2002-2003. She knew that her family wouldn't want to speak to her, and if they did, they would probably do so for criminal intent. I remember that she encountered some of her extended family in public (one of the scams was an elderly woman with a small toddler, and an index card with "I am poor, and have no money to my grandchild") and she would say "don't interact with her. Look over there, there, and in that car: that's family keeping an eye on her, and to warn her if things start to go down. Even if you say you know she's a gypsy, yeah, don't do that. They will find you, and hurt you." Some of the men would see a dent in your car and say they could repair it for $200 or something. Hot women would approach you and stroke your hand while they had "visions." She knew all the tricks. She was great at carnivals, too, like how things were rigged.