I think it was projection.
Dad's family was broken. He had an older brother and sister whom he never mentioned. They left the family and never returned. Dad petitioned the Yavapai County courts when he was 13 to take him, his brother, and his blind sister out of the home. His father took off for Mexico and never returned. His mother went through a string of lovers and I never learned what happened to her. He was raised, prior to the WW2, by his grandmother and his aunt and uncle. His aunt despised him and his siblings (they weren't hers, after all, but to be fair, by the 1960s when my brothers and I were born, well, grandkids can change everything, and I will always remember Tia for her big smile and open arms!). During the war his father tried to contact him. I don't know if anything ever came of that. After the war he was coerced into an arranged marriage. They had one son whom he insisted was Bobby Chacon, the boxer (and Bobby does indeed look a lot like my dad!), but the marriage was loveless and they parted mutually. When he met my mother there was a big to-do on her side of the family and her brother, a policeman, brought the wrath of the San Jose Police Department in top of him, forcing him into a jail record of trumped up charges. They got married anyway, and her ex-husband tried to wrangle the kids away from her. Of five kids, he got four. He nearly got all five but Tom, the oldest, like dad too much. (The reason the courts found for the father was most likely racial. This was the late 50's, early 60's after all.) It took him forever to get accepted by mom's family, and his aunt regarded my mother as a good friend right from the start (so she caved in first!).
As you can see, he had a rough and rocky life. We spent our lives shuffling back and forth from San Jose, CA to Prescott, AZ. Only in the past 10 or so years have I learned about how shattered his life had been. I think he was desperately trying to rebuild what he should have had, or to find the pieces that were now lost to time. It was projection. He wanted his grandmother back so badly, and I happened to be female. I think the rest of the family just believed him by default.
I tried, early on, to try to find some link, but it was like shouting down an empty hallway. There was nothing but hollow echoes. We even went to the place where he grew up, a part of Iron Springs, AZ, right to where the house (or rather, an actual one-room shack) now lay in ruins. We found some of his old toys and a bowl that belonged to his Grandmother. It was one she was proud of because as poor as they were, this one was made of China. It was beautiful, to be sure, but I had no connection. I felt nothing aside from amazed at how well preserved it was, having been buried beneath the silt of the now-dried riverbed.
I was wondering what else was there when a park ranger told us that we weren't allowed to take anything from the ruins. (It's now in a national park.) We explained that it was where my Dad grew up and the things were his. There was a bit of hesitation on the ranger's part, but he wound up letting us take what we could carry and to check in at the ranger station if we were going to come back and look for anything else, but Dad was in tears by that point as the memories overtook him.
After that visit, Mom and Dad never pushed the Grandma issue again. There was a bit of time that my brothers kept insisting that I think about the bowl and look for a connection, but by that point I thought it a waste of time. During our last move a lot of stuff got lost, and the bowl was among the items now gone. I do, however, still have the two toys were found. The only connection I feel is from this life in that they were my Dad's toys (his two favorite ones, to boot!) and my nephew likes playing with them when he comes over.
