I only know three things about my paternal grandfather: He was a teamster, he was very strict, and he died of tuberculosis when my father was 22. Other than that, and the fact that he fathered five kids, it’s like he never existed.
When families get together, it’s not unusual to talk about the old days, the people they knew, other relatives, their parents . . . . In all the years of being around my father’s family, of hearing stories about their childhoods, they talked openly and honestly about everyone except my grandfather. Even my grandmother, his wife, who lived with us for a while when I was a kid, never talked about him. I remember her telling me stories about her childhood in “the old country,” about coming to this country and raising her kids . . . but not one word about her husband! I even remember my father taking me to his father’s grave when I was small . . . but he didn’t tell me anything about the man buried there.
I know tons of details about the lives of my other three grandparents, even the grandmother who died 16 years before I was born . . . but there’s this big question mark in my family tree that will never be answered. Sadly, there’s nobody still alive who ever knew the man, and nobody else knows any more than I do.
(I do have one photo of him. He looked kind of mean, and a little like Hitler. That could be a clue.)
Is this unique to my family? Do any of you also have relatives that nobody mentions?
When I was 34, I was interested in geneology, and I started going over our family tree.
My father looked at my grandfather’s branch, and asked why hadn’t I put Great Aunt X on the list.
I gave my dad a blank stare. “What great aunt X?”.
He then told me all about this aunt, whom I’d never met, and things she did with her life, and things they did when he was a kid. I asked when she died - She hadn’t!
She’d been living in a town 30 minutes away for all my life, and I’d never heard her name before.
Then there was my other grandfather’s sister, whom I never knew existed until I helped clean out their house after my grandfather’s passing. She was active in sororities, was one of the first sea-bees, served in miltary hospitals, and had quite a distinguished career - but I never knew of her because my grandfather never spoke about her. I would like to have heard of her life from him, rather than from an old suitcase full of newspaper articles about her.
I’ve never heard stories about my great-grandparents. Even my grandparents didn’t talk about them. When I was little, I thought the family started with grandma and grandpa – I didn’t conceive (har!) that they had parents and grandparents. The greats were dead by the time I was born, but you’d think my mom and my aunts would have remembered them, but nada.
In mom’s family, everybody talked about everybody. There were always more stories about the women though. I figure that’s because the men weren’t as involved in family life – they worked, came home, cleaned up, ate supper, read the paper, went to bed, and died in their 60’s and early 70’s (some earlier).
Do you think your grandpa’s TB had anything to do with the silence? Was TB something that families were ashamed of? Did he spend a lot of time in a hospital or sanitarium?
Yes, I am that relative. I was raised by my mother and step-father since I was 2 years old. My biological father wasn’t ready for a kid and his family never really showed any interest in having me around but were nice enough when my mom dropped me off for visitations. After awhile I started to realize that they really weren’t much of a family to me so I asked my mother to stop taking me there and I hadn’t seen them since I was 13.
Fast forward to 15 years later, I now live 1,200 miles away from where I grew up. One day at a Wal-Mart I recognize a woman from back home who I think was a second cousin of mine. I asked her if she was so and so and she said yes. I asked her if she remembered me and after a bit of prodding she did. The reason she had trouble remembering me is because no one ever really talked about me on that side of the family. In fact she says I have only been mentioned two or three times since she last saw me. No pictures of me are hanging up in my relative’s homes. No reminder my biological father had a older son other than the one he raised. I was a ghost.
It was kind of weird at first but now I think it is actually kind of cool.
My great-grandfather. My g-gma seems to have married him to get away from her family, but he was no good and she divorced him very soon after my grandmother was born. She would never talk about him–no one even knew his name until a short time before she died.
Since it was so difficult for a single mom to support a child in 1918, my g-gma had to leave her daughter with an aunt or someone while she went looking for work that would support both of them. By the time she was able to take her back, the foster family had adopted her and didn’t want to give her up. So g-gma kidnapped her own daughter and took off for California!
There’s also my oldest great-uncle, my grandfather’s oldest brother. It wasn’t really that no one ever mentioned him, but he lived further away and his wife was not very friendly–they were happy to be on their own and she didn’t have much interest in visits. I never knew of his existence until they both got too old to manage and came to live with the youngest brother, and almost as soon as great-uncle was sure that his wife was cared for, he died–the day after I met him for the first time.
My paternal grandfather died before I was born.
He was born in 1888 in Middlebourne, Tyler County, West Virginia, and came here to Washington state around 1909 when he was in the US Army.
From 1909 till his death in 1946, my Dad and my Aunts said that he never mentioned much about his family back in West Virginia, (and his own Dad, my Great Grandfather, lived until 1932.)
His Mom died in 1896, and his Dad later remarried, and I heard his step-mother was quite mean to him. My grandpa and his brothers (my grand uncles) were then sent to live with relatives around West Virginia.
When I started doing the geneaolgy for my extended family, I tracked down some of my grand uncles, and I found out that they also didn’t maintain contact with the father either.
So I guess that as my paternal grandfather never mentioned his father, (and he was separated from his brothers) our family lost contact with our family on the other side of the country.
Since I started doing our extended family tree since around 8 or 9 years ago, I’ve been able to re-establish contact with much of my extended family in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and find lots more kinfolk all around the states and in other countries too.
My paternal grandfather and my uncle. Ironically, I am named for the two of them. Both died before I was born.
All I know about my grandfather was that he was a dentist, was big in the Brooklyn Medical Society, was an innovator in using film as a teaching tool for dentists, and was a pioneer of root canal surgery. They named a room after him at Columbia Medical Center, but it seems his name has been removed sometime in the past half-century.
My uncle died at Normandy on D-Day, after enlisting (much to the chagrin of my grandfather). He wanted to be a poet.
My grandmother never really talked about either; their deaths were too painful for her.
This was the We Don’t Talk About That era. A fmaily without skeletons in its closet probably wasn’t much of a family at all.
I would like to know more about my maternal grandmother. She was always sick (severe Addison’s at a time when there was little or no treatment), so much so that my mom was raised mostly by her dad and relatives. She died when my mom was very young, and my mom hardly mentions her. We believe she was Ukrainian in origin but was born in Germany.
My paternal grandfather was living in L.A. with my grandmother, dad, aunt and uncle. All of them except my dad went back to Japan to visit, 3 days before Pearl Harbor. I just found this out last week. They were stuck in Japan for the duration of the war, and my grandfather and my uncle died under mysterious circumstances. My grandmother remarried, and no one ever talks about my grandfather, and we rarely mention my uncle.
I have one aunt on my mother’s side who is estranged from the rest of the family. She had two daughters, one of which had Down’s syndrome and was institutionalized as an adult. We don’t much talk about any of them, except for my aunts who like to bitch about the estranged aunt.
I have no idea. By the time he died, all of his kids were grown, ages 22-32. They (and their mother) already had years and years of memories about him; but they never shared those memories. Imagine never ever mentioning one of your parents.
I do not have a clue who my biological father was. Blood tests have proved my mother’s husband wasn’t, but damned if I could ever get any information on it.
I realized recently I have pretty much never heard my mother say anything about her father who died when she was a teenager. What little I know about him I have learned from other relatives.
I don’t know any particular reason why, just that she and her sisters and my grandmother when she was alive pretty much never mentioned him. All I know is he died fairly young, medical malpractice may have occured, and my grandmother was left a youngish widow with four daughters and had to work full time to support them.
I think he was generally considered a good guy, it may have just been too painful for them to talk about him.
My grandmother was in the same situation. She was born in 1901, and her mother would never tell her a thing about her father. Shortly before her mom died (age age 83, with my grandma age 67) she told her that his name was Herbert, and she’d burned a photo of him only the week before.
Some sleuthing and serendipity finally revealed more details, but that didn’t come about until after my grandmother had died.
There are at least 3 that I know of. “Of” meaning that I don’t know their names, their lives, or anything about them other than if I were to try to make an accurate family tree, 2 should be there, by any definition of “accurate” and one would be a glaringly obvious hole.
But asking about them would be painful to the people I’d need to ask, and I don’t think digging up the subject is worth causing those people (who are family members I know and love) pain.
My father’s stepfather. When I was a kid, we used to put flowers on my grandparents’ graves on Memorial Day. My father and his sister, and her husband, their son and my sister and I would all go down to the cemetery. My grandmother was buried between two men; one had a different name, but they would stare daggers at him and do everything but spit. We kids would ask who that man was and why they didn’t like him, but the answer was always, “never mind.”
It wasn’t till about five years ago that I finally heard it from my much-older cousin. He was my grandmother’s second husband; when he died he left his valuable farm to his two children and his two stepchildren (the latter being my father and aunt). His son was given the responsibility of selling the property and splitting the proceeds. Except he ran away with the money.
This wasn’t the stepfather’s fault, of course, but it wasn’t going to be forgiven. Plus, I understand, he kept my grandmother isolated on the farm and wouldn’t let her leave to visit her children. He was pretty much a controlling asshole. But the stolen money was the final nail in the coffin, pun intended.
My grandmother, born in the late 1800’s and a true Victorian, didn’t mention her family at all, even to her daughter (my mom). Turns out Gram’s dad was an alcoholic who had leapt from a tall building at age 57. He was the only one she had been close to - she had been estranged from her mom and sisters since her teens. She left a family tree for us, of her father’s line, not long before she died, though. We deduced later that she must have cribbed most of the details from Burke’s Landed Gentry - so who knows how much even she had known?
I have now studied that family for over a decade and found another suicide, a bigamist (trigamist?), multiple Oxford Presidents, a Canadian artist, a prominent (living) Australian journalist, etc… The point being that it’s a shame that she didn’t talk about this stuff (or didn’t know of it), because she had a very interesting family…
My wife has an older sister who is estranged from the family and is pretty much never mentioned. We have no idea if she even knows of the existence of our children.
I just assumed when I was a kid that somehow my mom simply didn’t have a dad.
As I’ve gotten a bit older I’ve learned that he was an abusive alcoholic, though somewhat wealthy.
My mom will not even talk about him. Her and her sisters all took on my grandmother’s maiden name (until they got married), though my grandmother still has his name.
I’m pretty sure he’s dead? Dunno. I’ve seen one photo of him, with my mom, when she was maybe 4 or 5.
Mom doesn’t want to talk about him so I don’t bring it up. I’m sure there are some interesting stories in there but I can see the psychological scars on her and my two aunts so I figure it’s not worth digging into old wounds.
My mom certainly has gotten her share of crazy from her childhood, but never once was she ever abusive to either me or my brother. So I suppose that’s victory enough.
…she does hate it with a passion though whenever I or my dad have even a little to drink.
My great-aunt. Grandma had a younger sister with some kind of mental retardation. Family legend claims this was from being dropped by a babysitter. She was institutionionalized at some point and died young. When I was in my early 20s we were at Grandma’s house looking at old family photos and Dad found a picture that included Betty. I’d never heard of her and he said it was the first picture he’d seen of her.
I found out recently that one of my great-grandmothers died of suicide via gunshot. She was three generations back, I never thought to ask about her. But I have living relatives who must have known her (they all lived in the same city for years), now that you mention it, it’s odd that she never came up. Apparently the plan was to let sleeping dogs lie, but someone got wistful one day and brought up her death.
When I was seventeen, my uncle (Mum’s brother) got married. After the service, Mum introduced me to her Uncle Bob[sup]*[/sup]. Until that moment I had had no idea that such a person existed - and my mother is not overburdened with uncles either (as far as I know, he’s it).
It was a Catholic wedding, and mass was part of the service. The idea was that as each communicant went up, the bride or groom would whisper their name to the priest so that he could greet them by name.
So they go through the line like this, till they come to one particular woman. My uncle (the groom) looks at his bride. “Not one of mine”, he whispers.
She looks back. “Not one of mine!” she hisses back.
Turns out that was Uncle Bob’s wife (the groom’s aunt)