In the archives of Cleveland, Ohio, Bernard's hometown, we found a death certificate for his younger brother, Joseph, who was killed in a car accident right in front of his family's home.

So this was my grandfather's little brother?

That's right.

Yes.

Yeah.

And he died at just five years old of a fractured skull.

Yeah.

It's heart-wrenching.

Yeah.

How do you think it affected your grandfather?

I don't even know how I would begin to describe that.

It's horrific enough to think of seeing that happened to a stranger, let alone happen to another adult, let alone happen to another child when you are a child.

I can't even begin to think of how he would've processed that.

I guess the string of his life seems to be a lot of these traumatic events leading him to be this very grateful person when he was older.

Mm-hmm.

But this is, it's a lot to take in.

In the wake of his brother's death, young Bernard suffered another loss.

His father, a man named Frank Frygier abandoned the family.

Frank is Kristen's great-grandfather, and neither she nor any of her relatives knew where he went or what became of him.

His fate was simply a mystery, but we solved it, revealing that Frank eventually moved in with his sister near Hackensack, New Jersey, where he worked as a porter and maintenance man at a local hospital, before passing away in 1966.

More than 30 years after he last saw his children.

At the time, your grandfather, Bernard, was 45 years old and living in Ohio 430 miles away.

Your mom was 13 years old.

Wow.

So she never met her grandfather.

Mm-mmm.

What's it like to learn this?

You know, it seems like, I don't, you know... Just putting the pieces together, if I'm looking at it from above, I think Joey's death really affected him.

And I think that stands to reason.

When you think about losing a child and how it can uproot your entire existence, that level of pain.

Parents aren't supposed to see their kids pass away before they do.

As it turns out, Frank had seen a great deal of suffering long before he lost his son.

He was born in 1889 in a village in Poland, where his parents were farmers.

And in the Polish State Archives, we found death records for four of his siblings, all of whom died before their third birthday.

We also saw that Frank's mother passed away when he was just 13 years old.

Heavy!

Heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy!

What's it like to see that?

I mean, this is very informative, and the deeper you go, the more you understand.

You do that with characters that you're playing to, or any individual you try to have an interpersonal relationship with.

Now, I kind of understand why Frank, you know, made a lot of decisions that might not have been on the up and up.

Yeah.

Oof, oh, that's so sad.

We had one more detail to share regarding Kristen's great-grandfather.

The passenger log of a ship that arrived at Ellis Island in September of 1910.

On board was Frank traveling on his own at the age of 21 years old, leaving his widowed father and his homeland behind forever.

Oh, wow.

What do you think that was like for Frank, saying goodbye to his father back home, not knowing if he'd ever seen him again?

He must have been gutsy.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, I guess a lot of 21-year-old young men could be gutsy.

He clearly wanted to have a different life than his father.

Yeah, wow.

After all that we've learned about Frank... Yeah.

What do you think Frank would've made of Kristen?

Well, I would hope that he would be able to see that the generational trauma has waned a little bit, and that unfortunately he got the short end of the stick, having to go through all of it, but it yielded some really happy results with me and my life and my kids.

You wanna say, "poor guy."

Yeah.

Yeah, big time.

Yeah.

And I hope he'd be happy to know that we're happy now.