family secrets you learned when you were older.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

My mother moved out her parents house when she was just 16 because she couldn’t deal with my grandfather religiousness. However up until recently she had never told us why he had suddenly turned to hardcore religion.

My grandfather had always been, by all accounts, a really religious and upstanding man. In the second world war he lived in what in a small manorhouse with my grandmother in a village where he was the local headmaster. When the war broke out they were asked to take in a local jewish girl, whom they promptly adopted as their own daughter. Even managing to keep up the charade when German officers were stationed in their house.

After the war the girl’s relatives, whom had settled in Canada, managed to track her down. I know sending her off to Canada broke my grandparents hearts as they had really wanted children but unfortunately my grandmother was infertile. Instead they adopted my mother and her brother directly after the war.

However his shift to religion happened in the fifties when he volunteered as a teacher in a prison/asylum. It turns out that during one of his lessons he was raped by a prisoner (something which apparantly was not uncommon in prisons and hospitals at the time) Before that event he had been a somewhat religious man but that event send him almost mad and he spend the rest of his life what can best be described as atoning for a sin that had been forced upon him.

He started spending copious amounts of time in church, enforcing strict rules upon his household, started giving away everything he had, even when he inherited a fair amount of money, he gave everything to charity. When he died in his mid-80s, his time was spend between church, working for numerous charities, and teaching immigrants and their children in his neighborhood.

42

Nothing too earth-shattering here. When my mother was sick last year, she told me about how her parents broke the news to her that they were divorcing. Mom got invited to go along with her best friend’s family on a vacation. When she got home, her dad had moved out. Not the best way to deal with something like that.

Mom also said she thought my older brother might have Asperger’s. I’ve suspected something on the spectrum, too, but I didn’t know my mother thought so. And reading the will after she died, my brother inherited the house. I wish mom had been willing to talk about stuff like that when she was alive.

missbunny! Long time, no see.

43

I didn’t see much of my biological father growing up, although I knew he was married when he knocked up my 18-year old mother. What I didn’t know until he died six years ago, was that he had been married 9 times!! 9! And when all the half-siblings started comparing notes – there were two dozenish of us – some of them had heard of a marriage to an Amish woman, and also one to a Vietnamese woman while he was over there. I could have relatives all over the world, since he was a career Coast Guard, and went everywhere.

44

Wow! Nine marriages! Plus babies out of wedlock! Gives new meaning to the “girl in every port” meme. I bet he was quite the character. :slight_smile:

45

No, because despite it being some random name, it is the only name we’ve all ever used. But I have taken to looking up the history of our real last name and seeing if anything interesting comes up.

Robot Arm: I’ve been here - I read but just don’t post much!

46

My stuff is pretty trivial. My grandmother was known as Gertrude, but I discovered that her name really was Gisella. She hated it and never used it.

There’s also a possibility my family name changed slightly after they moved to America; the name was one thing in the 1900 census, but the current form in 1910. Could be a typo, but I thought my current spelling was odd considering where they came from.

47

My grandmother, a farm girl through and through, married my grandfather, a farmer, in 1919. It turned out he was just farming to avoid the WWI draft. After the war, he sold out and returned to his former trade as a builder. They stayed together until his death in 1970, but my grandmother was unhappy with their lifestyle.

48

I was 24 or 25 when I found out that my dad had kept my mom and my siblings a secret from his mom (and the rest of his family) until my sister was about 8 and my brother 2.

I don’t think he knows I know.

49

I think this is a fairly common thing. I remember when I was about that age, my group of friends chose to “shun” one our group. It lasted a few months, then everything went back to normal. My son’s group of friends is going through the same thing right now (he’s not the one being shunned). It sucks, but it’s random and won’t last long.

Re: this thread: I don’t have much of anything like that; my family tended to wear their flaws on their sleeves. One interesting thing, though, was that my dad was married/divorced (no kids) before he met my mom. No biggie for her; she knew about it. However, my stepmother was never informed of this fact. She might have figured it out or somebody might have told her; I don’t know if she knows. My mom told me she was talking to my dad on the phone (long after they divorced and got over it) and she brought that up, and he was all like “ooh, I never told Stepmom about that”, much to my mom’s amusement.

50

I was nearly 20 when I found out my grandmother was a widow when she met my grandfather - my dad must have been about 43 and it was news to him too.

Grandma wasn’t able to communicate by then so I asked Grandfather and he very proudly told me that he had made his proposal contingent on her first husband never being mentioned again, and she never did. She had mostly kept her word throughout their fifty year marriage… except she blurted it out to my oldest aunt once when aunt was a teen. A relative was in hospital for a simple routine surgery and Grandma was very, very anxious about it. Suddenly she told my aunt that she’d been married before and her husband had gone in to have a similar procedure, and had died. Then she clammed up again and never talked about it again.

Aunt became convinced that her mother told her this because she wasn’t really her father’s daughter, and that the earlier husband had been her father but I checked the certificates - my grandparents were married more than a year before she was born (Grandfather seemed to think it had been a close call but the official records say otherwise).

It was a family secret but not out of shame. In Grandfather’s own words, he didn’t want to be second choice.

51

The Grandfather from Hell had no incest taboo; at different points he tried to abuse sexually and/or prostitute his daughters and his grandchildren, with varying degrees of success.

Given the source it’s not a very trustworthy story, but apparently his own “initiation to sex” was aided and abetted by his mother. No, she didn’t lie down with him, but they lived in a sort of military installation and dear old greatgrandma sent him to run errands for the wives of officers… errands which did not involve the 11yo boy going anywhere but into these women’s houses to provide extremely-personal assistance. I can’t read García Márquez’ autobiography because the way he talks about his own initiation is very similar to the way Gramps does.

Mind you: until he came after me directly, I knew he was a pig but I had no idea how much of a pig he was. So I guess that “Gramps thinks that getting his grand-daughters to charge for their cherries” was a secret I found out in my teens.

52

I still have no idea what my grandmother’s middle name is. She hates it so much she won’t tell anyone. My grandpa knew, but he’s dead now. My uncle (her son) doesn’t know it. My mom knows, because she’s had to take PoA as Grandma’s declined and dealt with Official Paperwork on her behalf, but she’s keeping her secret for now. She says she’ll tell me when Grandma dies, but that it’s not actually that weird or bad, just that she’s respecting the old lady’s wishes.

53

My mom told me, right before I got married at 28, that I have a Cherokee ancestor on my dad’s side of the family. I found it amusing that she thought that was something she shouldn’t tell me until then.

54

My grandfather on my fathers side buried 2 wives & married a third. (My understanding is that women’s medical care basically sucked back then and that this happened a lot in coal mining communities) Third wife hated my aunt & wanted her out of the house, so she had a dinner table pecking order:

All the food was in a dish in the center of the table. Her husband pulled out food first, she second, and then the kids ate in age order with boys first, girls last. Basically, there was almost no food left when it was my aunts turn to eat. The bitch was trying to slowly starve her out of the house! :mad:

My father tried to help & held back some money from his paper route to get her some extra food and for a while it worked. But eventually both her and my father left that house. Its funny; I know how my grandfather died, but no one ever told me what happened to that 3rd wife.
I got the feeling that no one cared.

55

A friend of mine never found out she was adopted until her mid 30’s. Strangely, her younger sisters knew and blew the whistle (inadvertantly).

It seems a little odd to me given that medical history seems rather important as in what other members of your family may have suffered.

56

Not as exciting as others, but it wasn’t until after my grandmother had died in 2010 that I found out that my grandfather (who had died back when I was 7 or 8) had been a “Jack Mormon” (inactive, as they say about people who are officially still members but don’t attend) while my mother was growing up. My mother is uberconservative Mormon, creationist, and apparently Grandpa had believed in evolution, scandalizing for someone from Utah pre-WWII.

I happen to be back in the States, and my also extremely conservative uncle was there helping go through The Stuff, and he said something about The Letter, a copy of something which Grandpa had sent the church headquarters.

When I asked my mother about it, she just acknowledged it but the look on her face let me know this is something which I’ll have to ask my cousins about.

My sister didn’t find out that she was the product of a spousal rape until she was an adult (and of course, I found out much later) which goes a long ways to explaining a difference in which my mother treated her.

Now for some things which my kids will find out someday, and will be completely shocked.

My FIL had a second “wife” on the side while my wife was growing up. I’m not sure how to tell the kids, and I know my wife won’t, so they may or may not find out about that.

Probably more shocking will be the fact that I was previously married, and the official divorce date is only a week earlier than the marriage to their mom.

More shocking when they do the math on Pough-chan’s birth.

(I was legally separated for 5 years prior as I waited for the consent to the divorce. Still, it doesn’t look good on paper :eek:)

So, how to you work that into a conversation with you kids? How did school go today? And did I ever tell you about . . .

57

I was in my 30s before I found out my father was a high school drop out. He had been dead 10 years by then. He knew that WWII was coming to an end and he did not want to miss out. He dropped out of school and joined the Marines at 17. My grandfather signed his enlistment because he knew my father would just find another way in. They dropped the bomb while he was in Boot Camp thus ensuring my future existence.

My father pieced together the reason why he had the same first name as his father but wasn’t a junior. It was curious that he was the youngest of 5 and the only boy but it was him that had my grandfather’s name. But not the same middle name. No one in the large extended German/Irish family ever spoke of it but there had been another son. My grandparent’s first son was a junior and died shortly after childbirth. None of the children ever knew. And my father shared a name with his dead brother.

58

Not really a secret, but:

We were always told the story of my aunt and uncle who were unable to have children, and how my uncle was visiting France and bathed in the waters of Lourdes. Miraculously they went on to have a huge family.

A few years back, my sister and I asked an elderly aunt about this story and whether it was true. She replied “Oh yes, he went to Lourdes and afterwards they were able to have kids…of course she also went to a fertility doctor at the same time.”

So much for family miracles.

59

Never understood why my father didn’t really dig Christmas. Found out when I was a teen that his father had heart attack while putting up Christmas tree and passed few days after the holiday. After which my dads mother started hanging with hazel. My father described them as partners in every sense of the word. He only said that once. Can’t say it surprised me I didn’t know her but interesting. When I was very young my father and my moms brother ran a driving school. Apparently during a lesson my uncle flipped the car on some ice and killed his student. It was ultimately called an accident but I didn’t hear that story until a couple years ago

60

When an elderly relative of mine died almost a decade ago, I was finally allowed to know The Family Secret, one which this relative had wanted the younger generations to be told only after she died. I was in my 30s at the time.

I got suitably excited at the idea of a really cool skeleton in the family closet!

Alas, the truth was boring. It seems that this elderly relative had not been one of twelve children as I had thought. She was one of eleven. The youngest in the family was in fact the daughter of the eldest sibling. The family lived on a fairly isolated farm, and the youngest child was not very old when the oldest daughter “got into trouble”. So the young unmarried mother-to-be and her mother stayed hidden for a few months, and they more or less successfully passed off the baby as a new little sibling. She was raised by her grandparents, and her real mother spent the rest of her life alone and bitter.

This might have been more exciting if I had known any of the people involved, but the daughter in this tale died young, well before I was born, and the young mother of the story wanted nothing to do with most of her family, including the branch I belong to. :frowning: