I found out at age 10 my moms dad was actually her step dad. My mom didn’t realize till a few years after they were married that my dads mom was alive. And while not a secret my dad and his brothers all have different dads. Any one else have any to share.
I never dug with any depth amongst the family secrets, but I have found that whatever family secrets there are remain secret.
I had no clue that my Aunt Lu from Honolulu was gay until I found her listed on the 1940 census as living with a female partner.
You know how when families get together, they sometimes sit around and reminisce about their childhoods and long-lost relatives? My father’s family did this, but without ever mentioning my paternal grandfather. I know absolutely nothing about the man, except that he was some kind of teamster and he died of TB. Other than that, it’s like he never existed in the minds of his wife and five kids. And sadly, there’s nobody still alive who ever knew him.
I don’t consider this a family secret, but both my sisters and were interested in the WWII experiences of our Uncles Orville, Jack and Ray. They refused to discuss their wartime experiences when we were ten years old and never changed. So it is an untold portion of our background.
I have a cousin who it turns out was my brother.
My Daddy had an affair with my Mothers sister before he dated and married her.
The actual truth didn’t come out til both my cousin/brother and Daddy were deceased.
I have a relative by marriage whose father isn’t the bio-father, and all the other relatives know this. I keep hoping someday the relative will take an AncestryDNA test and discover this.
My biological father left the picture long before I entered kindergarten. The last time I saw him at all was as a teen. He passed when I was 47, and I found out after that I have a half-sister, only a few years younger than me. The only contact we had at all was to discuss (via snail mail) what little he left myself, my younger brother, and this sister. Nothing since 2007; all I know is she lives in Hawaii… I’ve even forgotten her name, now that I think about it. Never met in person.
My parents were weirdly secretive about a lot of stuff. They probably took plenty of (unnecessary) family secrets to their graves, but I stumbled upon a couple of things they didn’t want anyone, me included, to know.
One day I was going through an old cookbook of my mother’s, and out fluttered a yellowed newspaper announcement of their marriage over a quarter century earlier. “Hey look,” I said to my mother. “How cool - an old wedding announcement. But there was a mistake in what they wrote. It says daddy was in veterinary school when you got married.” My dad was not a vet; he was a pharmaceutical salesman.
My mother snatched the clipping away from me and threw it away. “Don’t you ever tell your father you saw this,” she warned me. I guess my dad WAS in school to become a vet when they married, but he flunked out. My parents thought that if I knew this, I’d think it gave ME permission to flunk out of school too. Or something.
It always irked me that they could never share this information with me. It didn’t make me think any less of my father as a person; it made him seem human.
Another big secret was that they had a secret marriage a few months before their official, public wedding. My mother let that slip in a rare conversation with me where she was relaxed enough to be honest (given when it occurred I’m going to guess she’d had a few too many and it loosened her tongue; there were a few years when she drank fairly heavily every Friday after work with friends from her job). They were married before a justice of the peace in November 1955 and had the big formal wedding after my mother graduated from nursing school in June 1956.
My mother told me that this was because “nice girls” didn’t have sex before marriage in those days, and my parents really wanted to have sex, hence the secret marriage. It had to be a secret because the nursing students at my mother’s school weren’t allowed to be married.
A few years after my mother told me this, and I was grown and moved out, they had an alarm system installed in their house. When I was home for a visit, my mother told me the code to set the alarm, which was 1955. “Ah, the year you REALLY got married,” I said. My mother looked horrified. “How the hell did you know that?” she asked.
I was perplexed. “You told me,” I said. “It’s very cute.”
She was distraught. “I never should have told you. Your father would be furious if he knew you knew. Don’t you ever let on that you know.”
Good grief. I found that downright annoying. Honestly, what a romantic story - they were so in love they couldn’t wait for the big wedding, they got married in secret. No one would think any less of them for that thirty years later. It was a bit insulting that they didn’t think their own daughter should be privy to what was actually kind of adorable.
I got my revenge for that one, though. They held a huge 50th wedding anniversary party and I was required to attend, and, as an only child, give a big speech in front of all the guests. I wrote and delivered a lovely paean to their decades of devotion, in which I included that they’d been so in love that they’d had a secret marriage.
Everyone thought that was incredibly sweet, which it was, so I escaped unscathed. I’m sure my mother wanted to murder me for telling, though. (My dad wasn’t the type to share his feelings with me, so he never spoke of it after the party was over. I have no idea what he thought.)
I had a cousin, very close cousin, who was gay, but she was closeted, so much so that she married a man and had two kids with him. She ended up committing suicide when her kids were small, so they never knew exactly why their mother died, and probably never knew that she was gay, Her oldest kid, who was maybe five when she died, asked me to tell him about his mom once, but was incredibly reluctant to actually sit down with me after I’d agreed, and he died last year. His younger sister still is living, thousands of miles away from me, and I don’t know how exactly to tell her, or if she even wants me to tell her, since she doesn’t know that there’s anything to tell.
One of my siblings is biologically my cousin. One of my parents had a sister who was much too young and unable to care for a child when she got pregnant. This wasn’t so much a family secret, I just didn’t know about it until I was much older.
My grandmother’s youngest son was fathered by her husband’s brother. Nobody has actually been able to prove it, but yeesh, looking at photos, the resemblance is striking.
A cousin on my mom’s side dug into our family tree and discovered her dad’s father (my great grandfather) died in prison - apparently he’d murdered a man. I knew he’d committed suicide and the assumption was that he was distraught after his wife died, leaving him with 3 sons. But it looks like the 3 sons kept the actual truth secret from everyone else.
On dad’s side, another cousin discovered that our mutual grandfather, who emigrated from Poland in the early 1900s, was one of 10 or 11 siblings. We only knew of one brother who emigrated with him. For whatever reason, he never thought it was important to tell anyone about the rest of our distant relatives. The cousin learned all this when she went to our grandfather’s hometown and met our distant family. I don’t know if there was anything nefarious involved, but it does seem odd that it was never mentioned.
I also just recently learned that my dad’s oldest sister was married before she married the uncle I knew. My mom had told me that my two cousins had different fathers, but she implied that the firstborn came of an illicit affair and that’s why my aunt moved to a different state and married there.
There have been random other little things that have come to light over the years - all hidden in order to keep up appearances of… something? Even into the 80s when one of my sisters got pregnant in high school - we were not to speak of it, because… scandal?? I don’t know. Fortunately, that secret is no longer kept, as we’ve all met her son, and she’s even met her granddaughter.
I learned at 20-something that my uncle is actually my half uncle. A cousin mentioned it had come up at a family gathering I hadn’t attended and I thought she’d misunderstood something, but my mom confirmed it and said she thought we’d already been told at some point.
Not really a family secret as such, it was just that the truly relevant details, my grandma getting pregnant, getting engaged to another man who then adopted the child, happened 30 years before any of us kids were born and it had never come up before.
Here you go…
My mom had a much older “cousin” named Susie that wasn’t really related to us. The story was that she was adopted by my Aunt Mary (also not related) as a baby. I had heard as a kid that my Grandfather was supporting Aunt Mary until he married my Grandmother, but once they started having kids he just couldn’t afford to do both. It may have been a coincidence that they all looked so much alike. Anyway, after my Grandfather died when all the kids were little my Grandma and Aunt Mary became best friends. Their relationship went on for decades without any issues. It wasn’t until they both died that Susie blew everything up. She claimed that Grandpa was her Dad and Grandma killed him. I was about 13 when things hit the fan so I don’t have any idea what actually happened. It was obviously very tense and dramatic at the time so I kinda stayed out of it. Now no living family will talk about it. I do know that he was an abusive alcoholic so even if it happened maybe it was self defense. They’re all dead now so I guess I’ll never know.
And also, Susie was pretty offended by the suggestion that she was a lesbian, so maybe not. Maybe she just lived with a woman named Mike for 30 years cause they were friends from back in the Army. None of my business anyway.
My paternal grandfather had at least one child outside of the 6 he had with my grandmother. He traveled a great deal for his business, and apparently slept around. He wasn’t a good man, or a good father to the children he had. The mysterious aunt contacted my mother after my father died, trying to find out information about her biological father. My mother put her in touch with her still-living siblings. They all got together, but I don’t believe they’ve bonded as siblings.
StG
When my mother and my aunt got interested in genealogy, my grandmother tried to discourage them.
“You don’t want any contact with them. They’re just a bunch of poor white trash.”
My mom and my aunt got into contact with our cousins, and went to a couple of family reunions. Most of the cousins own ranches and oil wells. It turns out, WE are the poor relations.
And Grandma’s sainted father turns out to be the instigator of one of the juicier scandals in the family history.
Another pattern my mother noticed:
A farmer marries. Every 2 years, his wife bears a child. The wife dies (often in childbirth).
The farmer re-marries. Every 2 years, his wife bears a child. The wife dies (often in childbirth).
[Repeat several times.]
The farmer dies. His last wife inherits the farm. The children of the earlier wives move west, to settle new territories on the frontier.
And that, kids, is How The West Was Won.
It was not Manifest Destiny.
It was Wicked Stepmothers.
Jeez. All these Grampa’s and Grandma’s gone wild.
It was a different time I guess.
