I discovered over the weekend, (purely by accident!!!) VERY strong evidence that my sister had a little girl 2 years after HS graduation. The evidence appears to prove she gave the baby up at adoption, and she pretended to everyone that my nephew was her first child.
The little girl would now be almost 11 years old. My nephew is 8 and my niece is 6.
She’s now married with 2 kids, and it appears that her family has no idea about this chapter of her life.
And me! I’m an O’Malley as well. We still have family in Co. Mayo, in Killadoon. They recently moved out of the thatch roof cottage that has been in the family for 300+ years, and into a real house with plumbing.
My family’s pretty boring. I may be the only sibling who knows we are 1/16 Cherokee on our Mother’s side, but that’s because I was the only curious one. I would love to know the story behind my paternal great-grandparents’ marriage. I know he was Welsh and she was English, and they eloped to Canada.
It would have been nice to know I could inherit mental illness from my father’s side; instead I turned eighteen and got a call from my aunt and uncle, “You know how your Dad was in a hospital for a while in college? Well, all of us had some problems too, so did your Grandpa, and we’re worried about you.” If my parents hadn’t been in denial, they would have already been noticing the warning signs, and I could have been learning how to deal instead of collapsing. Yeah, still a little bitter about that.
I was thinking about this thread, and I realized that a lot of us have done things that would have been considered scandalous family secrets “back in the day”. Anyone who has lived together without getting married, or even had a roommate of the opposite sex, would qualify. I had a male roommate in a two-bedroom apartment for a month during college. We didn’t really know each other or interact very much- he and a woman had been sharing the apartment, and I took over her lease when she moved out, and he moved out about a month later when his lease was up. But some friends of my dad’s seemed to think this was scandalous…
I certainly have done something else that would have been a scandal not too long ago- I converted to Judaism (from nominal Protestant Christianity) when I was 27. My sister married a Catholic man, though she hasn’t converted to Catholicism and doesn’t plan to. I’m pretty sure that either of those would have been considered scandalous in the 1950s in the town where my parents grew up, at least.
I’ve also gotten treatment for mental illness (depression and a couple of anxiety disorders). I made sure to tell my sister about it, so that hopefully she can keep an eye on her future kids for any signs of problems. When I have kids, I certainly plan to watch for signs of depression, especially when they are teenagers.
Sampiro, you better not be giving things away here – you’re supposed to be writing it in your book. Get back to the word processor!
Regarding the marriage + birth < 9 months, my cousin solved it nicely. They moved back their wedding “anniversary” date by a few months to account for the date math. Everyone in the family knew the truth, but I don’t think they ever told their kids. However, it still did not stop her oldest daughter from getting knocked up as a teenager and getting married after the baby was born.
[aside] My cousin has a very funny, Sampiro-esque story about running away to Georgia to get married by a redneck Justice of the Peace, dark night, old run-down house, sure they were going to get murdered and eaten, etc. [/aside]
Going up the generation tree, our family includes:
Seven grandmothers. Four on one side, three on the other. Both maternial grandmothers died when my mother and father were infants. On the father’s side, Grandmother #2 ran away one day and took all the furniture, and Grandmother #3 shot Granddad (not fatally though). On the maternal side, one Grandmother was divorced because she smelled bad.
My maternal Grandfather, after he had gotten rid of the 4th wife, carried on a long distance affair with a woman for 25+ years. He lived in Florida, she was from the ancestral homeland of Kentucky. He would pay for her to come down to Jacksonville on the train a couple of times a year and put her up in the best hotel downtown.
Oldest paternal aunt (who, family rumor has it, posed for a nudie calendar in the 1920’s) ran away with a Hypnotist from the circus. She came back several weeks later, claiming she had been hyp-no-TIZED.
Another paternal aunt’s husband died by falling down a flight of stairs. She and his brother were at the top of the stairs. They then got married. Hummmm.
Oh, and there was a first-cousin marriage a couple of generations up, which might explain a lot.
While not secret, my parents got married on 12/13 and I showed up 9mo later. Dad was in Airforce training up until the day before the wedding so we’re pretty certain that it didn’t happen any earlier. (actually a rescheduled date, they were supposed to be married in Sept of '69, but a hurricane hit Mississippi and they called up his training unit to fill sandbags). Since they left the day after the wedding on his way to his first duty station in Nebraska, I figure I was made somewhere about Niagra Falls (where they stopped).
As I’m pretty much a spitting image of my Dad, we’re pretty sure on the paternity.
Yep, now that I have a name, It rings with what Dad had told me.
For the rescheduled date, he had to make sure that he had passed his typing test to finish his tech school training, and be let out on leave to go get married… in case he failed, he had an “alternative plan” for someone to stand in for him during role-call while he was, in fact, AWOL, and planned to return the next day, hopefully with the USAF none the wiser.(somehow, not sure how he would have managed that considering he really had no money, and flights weren’t quite as easy to get as they are now) He didn’t need the plans though.
Not related to this story, but his sister, my Aunt, is also potentially one of those “Boston marriage” aunts as well… I’ve never gotten a straight answer out of either Mom or Dad, but even without confirmation, the evidence is pretty much out there. I’d bet we’ll never know, at least not until the day she passes, and the will is probated. (I’d bet roomie gets the house)
There is likely a gay uncle on my Mom’s side (her uncle), but that’s also unclear.
Other than that, the first divorces showed up in my parent’s generation… my damn uncles need to find nice girls to marry like I did, and keep their damn dicks in their own trousers… </rant>
Our first convicted criminal happened in my generation (a cousin).
That’s about it… I’m sure there are some stories out there, but I’m obviously too little of a gossip king to hear about them, or care…
I was utterly shocked to see my grandmother’s wedding pictures. In 1925 she married in a white dress and veil, with an 8 month’s pregnant belly. My mother was born about one month later.
When my FIL died, my MIL confessed to CubHubby (her oldest son) that she and FIL were never married.
My MIL had a child from an early, quickly failed marriage. This child, a daughter, was adopted by my MIL’s half sister. Half sister never told daughter that she was actually a blood relative, so when daughter started dating her uncle the truth had to come out :eek:
I have many more but I’d better stop now lest I be written off as trash.
I don’t have anything in my family (that I know of). My parents were married 7 months before I was born. Not hidden, but not talked about, either.
My ex, though, had quite the closet full of skeletons. A great-grandfather that was an escaped slave that fled to a Chippewa reservation in Michigan (father’s side). And on her mother’s side, she had a bat-shit looney aunt who swore that her grandfather left Michigan in the mid-1880s, changed his name and personal history (leaving a family behind up North), moved to Texas and ended up having a huge ranch that was later turned into a town. Her own son (my ex’s cousin) didn’t believe her, but humored the woman enough to move down with her to the same town in Texas just to help her harass that Texas family for “her family’s share” the inheritance.
My father’s father’s father was batshit crazy. His backyard was bordered by train tracks and apparently he liked going out with a rifle and shooting at the train when it passed. There are vague stories of cruel acts perpetrated on the various children and pets in his neighborhood.
He wound up killing himself. He put an overstuffed chair in the garage, on a sheet of canvas or something similar, and blew out his brains with the rifle.
Explains quite a lot about how messed up his son and grandson turned out to be, actually.
I’m a Pill baby; found that out when my mom learned I had started on the Pill and she wanted to make sure I knew it was far from foolproof. My older brother was wildly unplanned, my parents being under the impression Mom couldn’t get pregnant because of having been burned badly as a child.
How’d I find all that out? My drunk dad told me that neither my brother and I were wanted by him, we were mistakes that came along and he did the best he could because it meant so much to my mom. yay, thanks for that, Daddy…
I had 2 gay cousins on the same side of the family from brother uncles. One died of AIDS-related pneumonia just before my wedding day in 1994 and the other was roundly shunned after his father died and he dared to come back to town for the funeral. No lesbian aunt, but one who’s been married & divorced 4 times.
And if you go far enough back on the Kentucky side, there’s at least 2 murders of brothers by brothers for the wife of the other. No surprise there, the Singletons have been running shine and screwing around since they got off the boat from Ireland or England.
My grandmother, who died before I was born lived quite an adventuresome life before she married my grandfather. Including two previous marriages (the first was a soldier who died in combat shortly after he was shipped out, the other was another soldier who came back so shellshocked that his family encouraged her to get an annulment and move on with her life).
While going through some of her mom’s letters my mom discovered that a gentlemen friend of her moms- a man she always claimed to have just met once while on a long bus trip to Seattle and would occasionally send gifts to her and my mom- wrote incredibly beautiful love letters to her for years. My mom isn’t sure if the guy was kind of off and fixated on her mom or if their relationship was something more.
I had a gay uncle on my dad’s side who lived in Hawaii. Everyone in the family knew he was gay although his mother refused to believe it. Even after he died and the family had to fight it out with his wife, her lover and his lover. My family ends up as the villains in the story.
No. But I told you the story as the green-card-marriage baby told me, and I’ll leave it up to him to verify it, considering it’s his conception and not mine.
This is very boring in comparison to all of your depraved relatives . My father never admitted to dropping out of high school. I found out after his death. He dropped out to join the Marine Corps because he knew that WWII was coming to an end and he didn’t want to miss it. My grandfather signed the papers letting him enlist at 17 because he knew my dad would find a way around it. The A-bomb was dropped when dad was in boot camp.
My dad found out very late in life that there were 6 kids in his family not 5. The oldest died during childbirth or soon after. That was why my dad was named John but was not a junior. His dead oldest brother was junior.
My story is with one of my great-grandfathers. To be precise, my paternal grandmother’s father, Victor.
Officially, he was a wholesale tobacco dealer.
A few years ago, however, my father noted stories from other family members about how Victor was able to provide them with liquor. This was a problem for two reasons: 1) Victor died in 1933, and 2) Victor lived in Salt Lake City.
Doing more research, he discovered some other things about Victor. For starters, Victor also had ties to the sale of both punchboards and slot machines in Utah. Also, he had a monopoly on dealing tobacco goods in Salt Lake, that couldn’t be explained in any way.
At my Grandpa’s funeral, my dad met a half sister that he never knew he had - and she’s black!
On my mom’s side of the family (7 siblings) all of the grandchildren and great-grand children are mixed black and white - except for my brother and me (we’re Puerto Rican and white).
There’s plenty more screwy stuff - but that’s all I can think of at the moment.
When I was undergoing diagnosis for ADD, the woman who was seeing me wanted to get an idea of what the family history of mental illness, etc. was. I started to say there was none, but my father corrected me. At length. I found out quite a lot of interesting things about my family at the time, not all of which I’m comfortable sharing. But the biggest bombshell was when my father noted that my mother’s father had committed suicide.
I’d been of the impression for most of my life that he’d died of cancer.
Another great story from that side of the family revolves around my mother’s brother. My mother always told me that I should never, ever smoke pot because she knew that people said that it didn’t permanently screw you up, but my uncle had smoked it as a teenager and he’s still a little bit “off”, even to this day. Well, when I was about sixteen I started talking with my cousin, his daughter. She one day confessed she was a little weirded out because she’d found a stash of pot in her father’s room. So as it turns out, he’s still smoking it, and my mom doesn’t have the slightest idea.
(My mom also doesn’t know that I know – again, through the same cousin – that my grandmother has been telling that whole side of the family that I’m a satanist.)
Those are the family secrets. There are a lot of really cool stories though, especially about my father’s side of the family. My father’s mother wanted to be a long-haul trucker for years, and was even studying for it when she hurt her back and had to give the dream up. This was -after- she was my grandmother.
I’ve pretty much just got non-secrets in my family.
I’m 1/16th Cherokee on my mother’s side. My parent’s and I (as well as my grandmother) all thought it was really neat, but for some of the aunts (my grandmother’s sisters) it was deep, dark secret never to mentioned. These were the same aunts that said my two adopted cousins shouldn’t receive a copy of the family history, since “they weren’t really part of the family.”
The other non-secret is in France, on my father’s side. My grandmother’s husband (my genetic grandfather) died during WWII, and the man I always knew as ‘grandpa’ was someone I thought she’d married after the war. It wasn’t until about high school that I started wondering, hey, if she got remarried with grandpa, why does everyone call her “Madame Mylastname”? My father: “Oh they never got married, they just started living together.” :smack:
yay, thanks for that, Daddy…