If he was an American of a certain age, you might find him here.
We have an “Uncle Chester the Child Molester” who must never be mentioned. When I was about 4 and at some family reunion he got me alone and put his hand up my shirt. I can’t say that it was very traumatic because I didn’t know what sex was but I told my mother anyway. My father beat him up so badly that he had to go to the hospital and Uncle Chester was never to be seen at another family gathering again until his mother died and we saw him at the wake. My sister and I, being smartass teenagers, followed him around loudly asking him if he still molested little girls. He may have deserved it but it wasn’t appropriate to do at a funeral when the rest of the family was there, and our mother forbade us to ever mention his name again.
My paternal grandfather. He died before I was born, and I know only a little about him. When I was in college I asked my dad about him, and my dad told me a rather unpleasant story about his father (and mother, who’s still alive). It gave me a pretty good idea of why my dad’s side of the family is not close at all. In fact, my grandmother stopped talking to her sister when my dad was a small child and he only vaguely remembers his cousins. It’s very different from my mom’s side of the family, which is large and has reunions and keeps in touch and stuff.
I don’t know if I’ve ever even seen a picture of my grandfather.
My mom had a cousin who shot himself a long time ago, and he very rarely comes up at family gatherings. I interviewed his father as a part of a grad school project and though we talked about his entire life and he did talk about his daughter, he never mentioned his son once.
Oh, Uncle Tom, you loveable scamp!
Heh. Found this picture recently in a box of my Great Gram’s family pictures. We could easily imagine him saying, “Hey, that’s a good picture of me, can I have a copy for muh mama?” A mean drunk and simply awful.
The unibrow and mean drunk gene did not carry over into any subsequent generations, fortunately.