It’s not an especially weighty secret, but it wasn’t until many years later that my dad told me that my sister’s pet rabbit had originally been brought home to be fattened up and eaten before its cuteness won the day.
My family feels so boring. They get too drunk and blabbermouthy to have any secrets. My mother had one for a long time, though. She was an adult by the time she was told her father wasn’t her bioliogical father; some douchebag who ran off and left my grandmother with six children was. She was in her 20s before she knew, and met her bio dad soon after. I learned my grandpa wasn’t my bio grandpa when I was maybe 10.
I found out while doing geneaology a few years back that my grandfather had already knocked up my grandmother by the time they were married. This was in flat contradiction to the official family history that he had sent for her to come to Milwaukee from Austria-Hungary, and then they had lived apart there until they were married (i.e., everything was done “very properly”).
Somehow I figured out while still pretty young that my parents were people, adults with pasts, and that those pasts are, if not private, very personal, and understandably not told to everyone who wants to know. Not even the kids. And…I understood that. I was, apparantly, a very wise, if naive, little kid.
So, while I was interested to learn that my parents didn’t actually get legally married until the 4th kid was on the way, it was not very surprising. 
And yeah, if my mom hadn’t been pregnant with me, the eldest, they wouldn’t have gotten ‘married’ at all. Which doesn’t make me sad, even though they never got along that well and were clearly only together because of the kids, but it does make me ponder sometimes how their lives would have gone differently if that particular Valentines Day hadn’t been so…productive.
I’d love to know more about my dad’s family, but he talks when he wants to, and asking questions doesn’t work. Playing cards with him and my uncle is awesome, because they’ll talk about EVERYTHING, and a lot of it is the past that I am so curious about.
I just found out Darth Vader is my father. I’m gonna need a moment to digest this.
That girl you kissed recently? I hope you didn’t get past third base… especially don’t have kids with her. If they end up having a severe underbite, it’s not because you have alien blood.
I just learned last week that my mom, who died about 15 years ago, was raised Methodist. My sisters and I were raised Catholic, and I had no idea that my mom was ever anything else.
I didn’t find out until I was in college that in the 6th grade, I was shunned by practically everybody in my grade at school. Nobody would talk to me or play with me, I wasn’t picked for a team when we did team sports in P.E. or projects in class; the teachers called all the parents in for a conference one night and asked them WTF, and nobody knew. The teachers said to talk to their kids about it and, if there was a reason, pass it along so something could be done about it, and if there wasn’t a reason, tell them to knock it off. They never found out why.
I just figured I was a loner.
Found out a couple of years ago that my Dad’s youngest brother hanged himself. I was aware that he had died as a teenager, and I didn’t recall anyone saying that he had been ill, but I was under the impression that he’d had some sort of tragic accident. Most of the family assumes it was suicide, but one of my aunts suspects that it was autoerotic asphyxiation gone bad.
Not my family, but cwSpouse’s: One of his grandfathers apparently left a wife (we don’t know if there were children) in the old country when he emigrated to the 'States. There’s no evidence that he obtained a divorce before he married cwSpouse’s grandmother in this country.
We all have our sneaking suspicions about my grandmother. Sadly, my grandmother’s guard is coming down (with a bit of old age-y dementia). I kind of hope she starts spilling the beans about my mother’s paternity.
:: eebil grin ::
(No, really, it’s sad when Oma doesn’t remember who she’s talking to in the middle of a conversation. She could at least start being informative.)
How did you find out in college?
I grew up knowing that my grandmother’s current (second) husband wasn’t my biological grandfather (he was 100% Mexican and all her kids were white as sheets, how could I not?). But anyway, that part was not a secret. I met my bio grandpa a few times in childhood, but he lived far away and died when I was 10 so I didn’t know him well. What I *didn’t *know until later was: my step-grandfather’s mother illegally emigrated from Mexico to the US with all of her kids, back when he (the youngest of 6 siblings) was 5 years old. I do know he worked in the steel mill for his entire adult life, so I’m assuming he attained citizenship at some point along the way. I’m not sure how that all worked out, though, since he died when I was about 15 and I never thought to ask.
That story’s kind of boring, but interesting to me anyway. 
More scandalously, a couple of weeks after I told my mom about the sexual abuse my dad had subjected me to as a tween, she told me that a cousin of mine had also been sexually abused by my dad. I am afraid to ask my mom more about it because it’s a really unpleasant topic that I haven’t begun to deal with… but I’m wondering when THAT happened, AND when my mom found out about it. I also don’t know if she told my cousin that the same thing happened to me. Because my mom didn’t find out about what happened to me until I was about 25.
I haven’t asked my cousin about it, though. We aren’t close at all, and how do you bring up that topic anyway? “Hey, I heard the same dude molested both of us years ago… what’s up with that?” 
I was talking to my mom about how I felt kind of adrift, like I wasn’t going to end up where I wanted to be and had no idea how to get there, and she told me the story, something along the lines of “maybe you didn’t learn how to get along with people or fit in, or you just gave up on trying to succeed.”
But, really, it was much more inspirational than that sounds.
Remember, this was way back before nerds were cool.
What, it’s not like she’s my sister or something? Besides, her family is rich!
My father passed away last year. A couple months ago my stepmother brought many personal items of his (printed or written records concerning myself and my siblings, for instance) to distribute between myself and said siblings.
During the distribution session my sister and brother and I discovered our father had at one point apparently become so dissatisfied with his job that he had obtained a real estate license.
We had previously had no clue about this license, presumably because he never carried through with using it, or renewing it, or, obviously, mentioning it to any of us. Seeing this license made out in his name seriously startled us.
Meh, can’t even pay their phone bill. I just called Alderaan and I got a disconnected message!
I was doing some genealogy research, and found out my grandfather was married and divorced once before he married my grandmother. My 91-year-old mother had no idea.
Dude, not only is her family gone, but so is their entire real estate portfolio.
I found out in college that my uncle the preacher had served five years as a young man for bank robbery. He was a teller and had been the inside man.
A family secret we all learned at my great uncles funeral was revealed when we watched a video made from all of his home movies. Judging from all the footage he took of his wife while he was on leave in Hawaii, we now know that he was a serious ass man. This was especially funny considering what a prude he was. When his wife had died a few years earlier, we found a picture of him she had taken of him wearing a tiny little speedo type pair of swim trunks. They must have been donned under duress. His son made a copy of the pic and included it in a fathers day card. I wish I’d been there to see him turn red as a tomato, which was his habit when anything as “dirty” as swimwear was mentioned.
Just the right time, too: my kids just found out the same thing, the same way. We were married 12/13, and our son was born 5/25. We never hid it, either. 
I found out in high school biology class that my dad wasn’t my dad. They told us the night before to go home and get our parents’ blood types, which I did. Then I tested the next day - A+. My parents were both O+. My biology teacher helpfully pointed out in front of the entire class that this was impossible. I do wish he would have pulled me aside afterwards instead, but that’s the way it happened. It also inspired a little research.
Dad was in jail from 5/63-8/64. My birthday is 6/64. My mother denied it and insisted that he was my bio father. My dad, however, said, “You know, it was the 60’s; it was the time of free love, etc. But it doesn’t matter, because you are still my daughter, no matter what.”
We seem to be unearthing more and more of these as we do genealogy research, but some I learned directly from family members:
It’s not too unusual to not know the father of a child - my great-grandmother’s oldest is such a child, and Granny went to her grave having never revealed his identity. Perhaps he was married? Or World War I took him away, and maybe he never came home? Maybe it was just a passing thing… But we also don’t know the name of one of the grandmothers. Granny’s mother was, apparently, the issue of an affair between a married man and, well, someone. According to family lore, at some point my great-great grandmother was just left at her father’s house. My great-great-great grandfather apparently acknowledged her as his child, and she was raised by him and his wife (who must have been a saint!) We have no clue who the mother might have been…
I was also doing some research on my great-grandfather’s side of the family, and found a marriage certificate, dated 1816, that listed the bride as “mulatto.” Pissed my grandmother right off… 
And the recent death of my husband’s grandfather raised some questions that we were trying to answer via research and asking questions of the older family members. First off, Tony’s mom (the former daughter-in-law of the man in question) told us that Mr. C. had been married twice, and that there were some graves down at the family church that might have been his children. When I found his enlistment records, sure enough, he was listed as divorced when he joined up in 1942. I still haven’t found that lady’s identity, but the little graves are too early - apparently, they are the short-lived children of Mr. C’s parents. So, I was telling this to my mother-in-law, and she said “No, Mr. C married someone when he was overseas during the war.” Hmmm… Back to the research. We have a German WWII battle helmet that Mr. C collected at some point during his service, and (according to the family story) had painted by a POW with the places that Mr. C saw between 1942 and 1945. (He was in an engineer company - initially landed in N. Africa, and followed the Allied armies north all through Europe.) Until Tony got that helmet out of the barn and brought it home for safekeeping, no one had apparently ever paid attention to the inside of the helmet: it has a lady’s name, along with the words “Mama Mia.” So maybe that signorina eventually became Signora C? We just don’t know, but I hope we can find out eventually.
Also while researching Tony’s family, I found a copy of the 1930 census that indicated that his grandmother (the third? wife?) was adopted. We asked Tony’s dad about that, and he just said “Oh, yeah. The K family adopted her, but she always said that there were two families before that.” So it wasn’t a secret, but no one seems to talk about anything like that on that side of the family. Given that my father-in-law is in crappy health, and I flat out don’t like his brother, I guess I need to sit down and ask these questions ASAP, just so that the girls won’t have the same unanswered questions someday…