It was my dad’s sister. It didn’t help matters that my mother had co-signed a $10,000 loan from the aunt a month before my dad died (this was 1964). The aunt went to court to collect two months later, although my mom was left a widow with eight kids younger than 18.
I’m surprised my mother never blackmailed her. She did show up to my aunt’s funeral in 2002 (they had settled the debt the previous year), but some of us think it was because my mother wanted to make sure the aunt was really, truly dead.
That I have a grandfather on my mother’s side. Does that count?
I mean, I always knew there must be a guy. But my mother would never speak of him, and whenever I asked questions she clammed up and got all sobby. Dad would just say, “He was a real bastard. Don’t ask. And stop upsetting your mother.”
Fast-forward to age 30 - I’m friends with my aunt (mother’s sister) on FB. She posts an old B&W pic, circa early 1950s, of a youngish man, in army uniform, that is the spitting image of my little brother. I call my mother and ask her, and she swallows a sob, and tells me that was her father.
Interesting, and neat. Though the fragments I’ve heard tell me he was an alcoholic, and abusive. Very weird, to see a picture of a guy much younger than me and to learn that he was (still trying to figure out when and how he died) my grandfather. Double eerie to see my brother so much in him (I look more like my father, myself.)
I haven’t found out why he did it, but my best guess is mommy issues, I mean, what else could it be?
He was 23 when my sister was born, so it’s not like he was too young and he would have gotten in trouble at home if he said “Hey family, I have a girlfriend and she’s pregnant!”
I think he was just really afraid of my grandmother’s reaction, which is weird, because my grandmother was not strict, severe or domineering at all.
I really don’t understand this sentence. Is “hanging with hazel” some sort of euphemism for something? Or did you mean, your dad’s mother started hanging out with a woman whose name was Hazel?
Hazel is a plant, a nut, and a color, so without the initial cap, I can’t be sure you’re referring to a person’s name.
About three years ago, after my aunt had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized, my mom told me that when she and my dad were first married, my grandma had also had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. My aunt was a little girl at the time. I don’t know if any of my sisters or my aunt’s children know about it to this day.
I was 15 before I knew my mother had been a nun, does that count? Evidently she thought I knew - she doesn’t talk about it because people treat her like a freak when she tells them.
Not my family secret, but a friend’s. I think I have mentioned this before, and it’s definitely not a secret any longer…
If you have read Blood and Money by Tommy Thompson, you know the story. If you haven’t (you should), here’s a very brief synopsis.
In the mid to late 60s, Joan Robinson was the society queen of Houston. She was all over the society pages in the paper, was an accomplished horsewoman who won numerous trophies in competitions, and was a damn good looking woman. She married Dr. John Hill in a big society wedding, but the marriage had problems from the beginning. Joan died in 1969 from a sudden, mysterious illness and her stepdad immediately began agitating the local D.A. to have her husband arrested for murder. He eventually was. Dr. Hill’s first trial hung and while he was waiting the second, he was murdered at the front door of his house.
The investigation of his murder turned up the name of Lilla Paulus, who was a big-time shady lady, running whorehouses down in Galveston and a string of call girls throughout Houston. During her trial, the main witness against her was her daughter, Mary Jo, who testified that her mother turned her out as a hooker when she was 11 or so.
I didn’t find any of this out until the book came out in 1977. I went to high school with Mary Jo and really liked her. I had no idea of her family secret and to this day, I wish I could locate her to tell her how sorry I am that she was treated the way she was.
No real big secrets here that I know of, except the uncle who committed suicide and I was told it was a heart attack. It wasn’t hidden very well though as one aunt started to raise money and speak out about mental illness as a result and until she recently passed the reins to someone else (I think she started a not for profit for it) She was quite vocal (written up in magazines, on the news for interviews) and fairly well known in mental health circles in Canada for what she was doing (or that’s the impression I got).
Otherwise I didn’t learn that my Great Great Grandparents came from a German community in what is now the Ukraine until my Great Grandma’s funeral. No one speaks of it because it’s a non-issue, but I really should try and do some genealogy on Dad’s side. It might turn up something interesting or it might just be info but I want to know things either way. Should do it while some of the older relatives are still around.
My mother’s response to “so why did you think it was OK?” varies, but eventually comes down to closing her eyes real hard, sticking her fingers in her ears and going “lalala”.
Then again, it took her 30 years to believe I and 5 other students were assaulted by one of our teachers… in her world, what she doesn’t want to believe exists does not exist.
There has been a secret in my family for about 73 years now. My grandmother divorced her first husband right around the time my mother was born. No one would talk about why they divorced so quickly, and the only people with the inside scoop have died. My mother is curious about it! She knows the name of her father, but nothing else of him. (And surely he’s dead now.)
I always knew that when my parents married, mom was 17 and dad was 22. What they told me in private was that they were 14 and 19 when they met. I told my brother and sister this, and they wouldn’t believe me. When they asked, my parents told them 15 and 20. So I guess I’m the only one they trust with the truth!
My father knocked up his high school sweetheart, so somewhere out there I have a half-brother who is 11 years older than I am.
My mom’s father always told her “if you get pregnant before you’re married you’d better not come home,” so when she got knocked up, she flew to New York state to have a 2nd trimester abortion. She was supposed to start her period the day she and my dad got married; March 3 - my brother was born November 17.
My aunt got married at 19 to get out of the house; got divorced less than 2 years later and married the man I know as Uncle. Kids never knew it until they found a copy of the marriage license.
On my husband’s side of the family, there was an incestuous relationship between an older sister and younger brother back in the 40s.
There’s an allegation that my paternal grandfather sexually abused his children. There really isn’t any physical evidence and his kids won’t directly admit that anything specific took place, but a girl grew up to be a lesbian and “everyone” knows that lesbians come from girls who are molested. He was also spoken of as a alcoholic and a general loser. Also, he died way too early and I grew up living near his grave and I was not told of that fact until I was over 30.
I have gotten flak for having compassion toward sex offenders. They are people who made a few bad decisions in life but I am completely unable to feel any hatred toward them. Maybe this is one of the reasons why.
We got some family tree information from a very, very distant cousin in Europe (like, 5th cousin or something) who’d done a lot of research. Turns out my great-grandfather was quite probably Jewish, but married a Catholic woman in the US. We presume he either converted, or at least agreed to have the kids raised Catholic. He did change his name to a very English one (he himself was from eastern Europe).
One of my brothers (the asshole one) was really argumentative about the prospect of our g-grandfather being Jewish. The rest of us were pretty much “so what?”.
My father was in the Army air corps very briefly at the beginning of WWII. He was cashiered when he crashed a plane. I didn’t know this until my brother found some reference to it after both parents passed away. Dad did wind up serving in another branch of the services.
About 4 years ago, one of my aunts was doing some genealogy and found out that her mother was not white. She was half black African and half “Lascar,”, meaning most likely that her Dad was from the region that’s now Bangladesh. How they failed to notice this is a bit odd, since the Grandmother never looked entirely white. Odd to think of her growing up in the Woolwich dockyards as a mixed-race kid in the 1910s then keeping her background a secret from even her own kids.
When filling out a ‘Grandparents Book’ with my Grandad it turned out he’d had two kids out of wedlock before marrying my Grandmother - one in Glasgow, where he’s from, to a woman who ran the chip shop, and one in Germany just after the war (he’d been in one of the early brigades to invade Berlin). He’d loved the girl in Germany and had planned to marry her and raise the child, but then had got posted elsewhere suddenly, and had left a letter to be given to her, but never heard anything back.
My little brother probably doesn’t know any of the other family ‘secrets’ - things which are bad, and that everyone else knows, but he, as the baby of the family, was always protected from. I bet he doesn’t even know that my Dad’s not his biological father.
Was your Dad still alive when you found out so that you could reassure him you did love him and were grateful for all he’d done for you?
We didnt find out until my Uncle died that he belonged to a WWII project that listened in on Russian transmissions. My Uncle spoke fluent Rusky, and not one person in our family knew except his brothers (who were also in WWII)