Hi Susan,
I enjoy & relate to your stories.
It reminded me of a visit from my late husband's Argentian cousins... I had never met.
They had shared paternal grandparents from Warsaw.
When I ran out of conversation because they were strangers to me. I took out an album of old pictures my husband created, in homage, to his dear papa. when he suddenly passed away, in 1960. An only child of Polish immigrants, born in America, who arrived here in 1938, he had zero knowledge of who the young children were.
We assumed they were probably murdered in the Holocaust along with other family.
When a posed portrait of an adorable small boy and toddler girl came up on a page of assorted children, the male cousin a man in his 60', literally cried, "Why that's my baby sister and I"!