Exactly my reaction when I found out, which wasn’t until I met a guy with a birthday a day before mine and he told me how because of his b-day he was 90% sure he parents boinked on V-day and a big lightbulb went off in my head.
My cousin came to me last year and told me she’d been doing some calculations. Turns out Grandma was pregnant on her wedding day. As were 5 out of her six daughters. 
No one knows who my other Grandma’s father is.
Same Grandma told me a few years ago that she didn’t meet my Grandad number 2 after her divorce, like I’d been told. She was seeing him before she left Grandad number 1.
both my so-called “half brother” and “half-sister” aren’t my half-siblings – their mom was/is a lying cheating whore, and we share no blood. at least for my father’s sake, he found out when my “half-brother’s” half-sister was born. otherwise, pa might not have left the whorebag, and i might not have been born.
i think my mom knew from the start… my (true) sister & i know, thats for sure. and possibly some of our cousins know. i mean, if you go to university, you will most likely take a basic biology course, which would introduce you to the concept of dominant & recessivbe traits. and if you apply those concepts, it becomes pretty obvious that “half ‘a’” and “half ‘b’” aren’t really halfs at all.
by the time pa passed on, he had never mentioned that he knew, or suspected, that “half-bro” was not really his son… but he did leave fake bro out of his will. so i think he at least suspected. fake sis was never mentioned for the last ten or more years of pa’s life, so i assume he knew about that. at any rate, pa payed child support to his ex- until fake-bro was eighteen, but nary a penny for fake-sis.
pa was even challenged a few years ago to pay back support owed for fake-sis in court, but when he got his lawyers to demand a dna test to prove he owed, the case was dropped. so that says a lot.
IIRC, blue eyes are the result of two parents whose recessive genes met at that special moment; the only prerequisite of producing blue eyes is that both parents possess the genes. The genes are recessive, so both parents must possess them, but that doesn’t mean that parents possessing the blue-eyed genes cannot have a brown-eyed child. Or that brown-eyed parents don’t possess the blue-eyed gene. Possessing the genes for something on both sides does not mean that it’s a “given” that the resulting child will have them. Whether it’s blue eyes, blonde hair, attached earlobes, or any other recessive-gene trait.
I have red hair. My father has dark brown hair. My mother has red hair.
Obviously my father possesses the recessive red-hair gene, even though he doesn’t display it himself.
But…that IS what it means. Yes, brown eyes parents can produce blue eyes children, because both parents can have one DOMINANT brown eyed gene, and one recessive blue gene. Since brown is dominant, it is expressed. They have a 25% chanve to make a blue eyed kid, because both blue genes have to meet.
When they do, that child will have ONLY blue genes, no brown ones at all. If that person mates with another person with blue eyes, there are no brown genes in there anywhere, only blue.
What? You mean they were doing each other or something? o.O
No, they were doing the elephant.
(But it was a girl elephant.)
Come on Miss, you still have plenty of time. Make your family proud!
Wait a second – they were each other’s sisters? :eek:
twicks, feeling a little left out because none of her aunts were in Boston marriages…
My moms father was quite the ladies man. I don’t know of any half-aunts or uncles, but It did get him into trouble more than once. My mom came back to the company housing after a weekend away only to find the house empty. A neighbor told her that the family got kicked out when Grandad was fired for boinking the foremans wife. I recently got a great picture of him in the coal mine on the phone and knowing him, there is a good chance that he was chatting up a woman on the other end. A picture I have of Grandma with children ends rather abruptly and mom told me that grandma had a habit of cutting Grandad out of family pictures when she was pissed at him.
My late grandmother was illegitimate…quite the scandal back in the day. She was raised by her grandparents.
I was also born two months premature. Now, my younger sister was an Rh baby and was born one month premature, and it was touch and go with her for awhile (I understand they gave her a complete blood transfusion when she was born, but that could be my grandmother talking out her ass) but there was never any scuttlebutt about how I, born even earlier than my sister, survived quite easily.
I finally figured it out, confronted my mother, and was quite pissed that she had withheld that information.
My son, by the way, knows why he was born eight months after his father and I got married. It doesn’t seem to bother him much…we never made a big deal of it. We were engaged to be married, we just jumped the gun a bit.
My grandpa, when he was in his late teens or early twenties, met this girl at a pub or someplace and they spent the evening together, dancing and whatnot. After a few hours, since it was dark and dangerous outside, he walked with her back to her place, dropped her off there, and then went back to his ship.
Turns out, she never made it back upstairs and Grandpa was the last person anyone had seen with her.
He was in the Navy at the time, shipped out the next morning…found out a couple days later that she’d gone missing and that he was a suspect. I’m not sure how it was resolved but, as far as I know, Grandpa hasn’t done any jail time.
Another macabre* family incident involves the death of a great great (or something) uncle. He had an aneurism and died rather suddenly during dinner one night. Grandpa (same as above) told my mom that when she was little. For years, that’s how she thought it’d happened.
Well, Grandpa left out a detail. Right before he died, the great great etc. uncle looked directly at his wife and yelled out “You poisoned me!” before falling face-first into his soup.
*I know it should be gloomy and awful; I can’t help but laugh though.
I certainly hope not, but it would explain ALOT about their behavior. Mennonite chicks can get freaky sometimes!
My great-grandfather was an eccentric old man living on a small ramshackle “ranch” in an area that had become over the years an urban center. Imagine a normal urban/suburban block on a main thoroughfare with an acre covered in weeds with a shack and a few cows. That would be “the old man”, as we called him.
After a while, he started becoming unable to care for himself, and he spent the last few months of his life in a nursing home (where he still managed to hit on his estranged ex-wife, my great-grandma).
So one day before we sold the property, my grandma found an interesting newspaper article. It was about the squatters who were living on the old man’s property- a problem he had for a while but was too old to do much about. They all wondered where “Old Man Sven”, as they called him, was. The paper gave this whole mysterious story about how nobody knows who he was or where he went. It made a lot of wild conjectures about his life based on the squatter’s guesses and fantasies. It was quite a piece of work. Especially while we sat there reading it, knowing exactly where the old man was and that all of that was well documented and figuring out the "mysterious disappearance’ was as hard as looking up a death certificate.
Another one with the gay aunt. Geez, it’s a popular secret, isn’t it? My grandmother’s sister was married to a womanizer, had a daughter with him, divorced, and then became very close friends with a former professional womens baseball player. They lived together for several years in a tiny cabin with one bedroom and a double bed. Hmmmmmm. . .
My grandmother had a half-brother that only she and her sisters knew about. Her father had an affair with his wife’s married cousin back in the 1920s. My grandmother and her sisters were kids at the time, and saw their father visiting this woman on more than one occasion (she lived down the street). When the woman had a son, no one thought it was odd since she was married, but when the boy grew older, my grandmother and her sisters noticed how much he resembled their father, and they put two and two together. The mysteroius half-brother died recently, and my grandmother told the family the secret. The half-brother, however, died with absolutely no idea who his biological father was.
My cousin didn’t find out until she was an adult that her older sister was actually her mother. Her “sister” got pregnant at 14 and my aunt raised the baby.
Not me, but it was a big surprise to my grandfather when, upon joining the Navy, he found out that his name and social security number didn’t match. Turns out my great-grandparents were having a bit of a dispute over what to name him, and my great-grandmother put one name on the birth certificate while telling my great-grandfather that they could name him what he wanted. Great-Grandma called him the wrong name for 19 YEARS rather than lose an argument. So a secret to the rest of the family, but no big surprise to her when the truth came out.
It is possible for full siblings to have different Rh status. Also, the antibodies that cause trouble in cases of Rh incompatibility develop in a woman in response to the first incompatible pregnancy – so it is not uncommon for there to be no problem with the first kid and complications with subsequent kids. In developed countries, with the availability of testing and Rhogam, these are mostly problems of the past.
My birthday is Nov. 11. February is an interesting month, eh.
Rather along the lines of DeVena, my former husband found out during our marriage that his youngest maternal uncle was *also * his half-brother. Nice folks.
Less seriously, about four years ago I found out the wedding date of my grandparents (in 1902) vis a vis the birthdate of my eldest aunt (also 1902), by then a few years deceased. Those of her siblings there on the occasion said that the aunt, who was a very prestigious and rather pompous woman, had *not * enjoyed that little factoid being mentioned. Personally, I thought it was marvelous. That marriage between my grandparents produced twelve children (my Dad is the youngest), so they must have had a fairly healthy physical relationship.