Family secrets

I didn’t know til I was almost 50 that my mother had been married to someone else before my father, and she’d had an abortion in Mexico in 1940. Also, my maternal grandmother had been married six times and my mom’s favorite stepfather was someone I’d always thought was just a family friend.

I don’t have any huge ones, although there are a few things I wasn’t told about until I was older. I didn’t quite grasp what my aunt had gone through in Europe to survive WWII, nor that her disability she’s always had (albeit, it was very mild in my childhood, and became serious only when I was about 30) was actually caused by the malnutrition she experienced as a very small child. I understood that her father and oldest sister had been in concentration camps from about the first grade, but no one sat me down and told me what that actually meant until I was maybe 11.

My aunt’s family was split apart for several years, but did reunite. I didn’t get that for a long time. I didn’t get that her other sister had been a hidden child, or exactly what a “hidden child” was, for that matter, until I was about 12.

Other things someone had to sit me down and explain:
My several greats grandmother lived in the south, and came from a wealthy family, which disowned her because she married a gentile, specifically an Irish Catholic immigrant.

He, himself, was excommunicated for nun-napping. A friend’s daughter entered cloister, then wanted out, but they wouldn’t let her leave, so she wrote a letter, and got someone to smuggle it out. Her father and his friend, my ggg-grandfather, went to the cloister, broke in, and removed her. They also appropriated a rowboat to do so, which they returned, but it was still technically stealing. All three were excommunicated.

In regard to my ggg-grandmother’s family (I might have missed a G, I’m not sure): they were a wealthy family in the US south before the civil war. I have chosen not to know much about them. They disowned my direct ancestor, and that’s good enough for me. I probably don’t want to be related to them. If they’d been active abolitionists, I think someone would have volunteered the information. Since no one has, I’ve chosen not to know anything further.

I do not know my paternal grandfather’s original last name. I could probably find out, but I don’t really care. The name that was my maiden name was the last name of my grandfather’s stepfather. His original father died before he was 5, and his mother remarried. He began using his stepfather’s last name, and used it for the next 67 years. I don’t know that there was a formal adoption or name change. He was born in 1905, and you were what you called yourself.

It happens that I, and the rest of my family, turned out to be someone else’s secret.

Some of my father’s family came from England during the great wave of immigration beginning in the 1880s. They came in second class, and breezed through Ellis Island, speaking the King’s English. Most of them stayed in New York, and joined local Jewish communities. But a few reinvented themselves, moving places like Connecticut, and quietly attending the Episcopal church.

When I was in my 30s, I was contacted by a third or fourth cousin, who had just discovered her Jewish roots, and wanted to learn about them. Apparently, she’d been a little shell-shocked when first learning (her words; I don’t know why), but was OK by the time I met her.

That’s all I can think of now.

Oh, another thing I found out after my dad died in 1970: he’d been married before he married my mom. I thought both of my parents had married late in life, my dad at 39, my mom at 32, which was true but then I found some papers showing that my dad had been married in his early 20s to a woman in her late 30s and that marriage had been annulled. No one was still alive who might have known anything about this early marriage, though I did manage to find out that the woman he had married had just recently died and left a daughter (from a different marriage), who I didn’t bother to contact–why upset her? But I am left wondering about that first marriage and the basis for its annulment.

There were things about my parent’s relationship that I didn’t know until I was an older adult - nothing really scandalous, but interesting enough to cast a new light on their relationship.

I’d always known they’d met on a double date but I assumed that meant some friends had set them up. But the real story turned out to be that my mother was dating a guy, apparently some rich gorgeous guy that was considered a real catch - and he wanted to set up one of his friends with one of her friends.
So they arranged the double date, and my mother and his friend (my Dad) fell head over heels in love the first time they set eyes on each other. Within a month, she’d dumped her boyfriend and was engaged to my father. They married three months after that.

I wasn’t born until 14 months after they married, although I’m pretty sure that everyone was expecting her to have a “premature” baby.

They weren’t particularly young (she was 29, he was 30). The marriage was successful. I always knew my mother was a great believer in the concept of “love at first sight” but until I was much older, I never knew why.

A few months ago I signed up for a free one-week account on newspapers . com and downloaded a bunch of stuff on my family & ancestors. That’s when I learned my mother was engaged to get married (in 1960) before she met my father. I asked her about it and she said, “Well, sometimes things just don’t work out.” I didn’t ask her to elaborate.

My mom’s mom apparently really liked having sex. She was married five times (outlived them all) and reportedly slept with anyone she could lay hands on. As a result, my mom has no idea who her real father is and she has no memory of the man listed as father on her birth certificate. She called her second stepdad dad while growing up.

I found out to my total shock two years ago that my mom had been married before she met my dad. A guy she knew in her NH hometown; apparently they got it annulled (= Catholic divorce) within like 3 months, and she soon moved to Ohio where she met my father.

The thing is I was the last person in the family to know. My dad got very drunk 40 years ago and spilled the beans to my younger sister, who never told me.

This story was a jaw-dropper for me: not your parents’ behavior, but yours. I can’t for the life of me see why on earth you would view your parents’ not choosing to share with you what they saw as a very personal episode in their romantic and sexual life together as a source of “annoyance” or “insult” to you, or deserving of “revenge” from you.

And whether or not you were personally affronted by it, I’m gobsmacked that you deliberately betrayed your mother’s request to respect her privacy about that episode by spilling the beans at a huge party in front of all their guests.

I hope I’m just overreacting and your parents didn’t really care about keeping this information secret, which the lack of repercussions for your blabbing would suggest was the case. But the way you tell it, it sure sounds as though you just unilaterally decided that your perception of the episode as “romantic” and “adorable” and “sweet” was more important than your mother’s perception of it as “private”, and that therefore you were entitled to disrespect your mother’s wishes in broadcasting this personal information about her.

As for the OP, I personally don’t know of any family secrets among my relatives. Maybe there aren’t any, or maybe my mother was just more careful than CairoCarol’s mother about not telling her children things she didn’t want blabbed around.

I didn’t learn until maybe my 20’s that my mom’s oldest brother is only her half-brother; my maternal grandmother was married before she married my maternal grandfather, but her first husband was a physically abusive SOB and she got out of that marriage quickly, but not before she was pregnant. My maternal grandfather married her and raised her first child as his own. I’m not sure how old my mom was when she found out about it. This all happened in the 1940s so as you can imagine it was a pretty taboo thing (though I’m sure wasn’t at all uncommon, just not talked about).

A bigger secret that I didn’t learn until my late 30s is that I have an older half-sister. As far as I knew I was the eldest child and only had one sibling (my younger brother). Then one day I was at a dinner party with my dad and his third (and current) wife, and he had had enough to drink that he let the information slip. Now, she was someone that I knew, because she was the daughter of my dad’s second wife. someone he knew as far back as high school. I just didn’t know that she and I were related by blood, I just knew her as my (technical) step-sister. (I say “technical” because when my dad and her mom got married I was already in my 20s so it’s not like we had any real sibling relationship, I barely knew her and still barely know her.) As far as I know, she still doesn’t know that we are siblings. My dad swore me to never tell her (not that I am in contact with her, I haven’t spoken to her in over a decade) and that he wouldn’t tell her until the man she thinks is her biological father passes away. I thought it was a mistake but it’s not my business to go breaking that secret. I don’t think my younger brother even knows about it, though I also am not in contact with him either (he is a violent criminal currently in prison).

I also found out not long ago that I have an adult son. Many years ago, a girl who was dating my friend broke up with him and starting dating me. We got pretty serious for a while (even got engaged) but our relationship was bad (for one thing she was pretty violent) and eventually she left me to go back to him. Shortly after I learned she was pregnant, and I thought it was mine. When her son was born, it was around 8 months after we first slept together, and she had sworn he was brought to full term, which meant that he couldn’t have been my son. She raised him as the son of my friend and that guy was his dad as far as everyone was concerned.

A few years ago I received a call from my friend who said that his son did an Ancestry.com test which matched him with me as his dad. At this point he is in his 20s. I said I didn’t know how it was possible since he was born so early, and my friend told me that he was born about a month premature. (So my ex-girlfriend lied to me, obviously, one of many lies she told.) My friend asked me to please not contact him, though it was okay if my biological son reached out to me. I told him that since I didn’t have any part in his childhood that I didn’t have any right to try to be part of his life unless he wanted me to be, and said I was okay with those terms. I’ve still never heard from him. My wife knows about him (I told her about an hour after I found out, I don’t keep stuff from her) but nobody else knows because I don’t want anyone else hassling him about it (via Facebook or anything).

I still feel guilty about that one even though I really had no idea all those years, and if I’d known I definitely would have stepped up and at least offered to help out in some way. It’s not rational to feel guilty but I can’t help it.

My mom’s cousin got married at 17 due to a pregnancy scare, but the first baby arrived after their first anniversary.

I didn’t realize until my grandparents’ 50th anniversary that my mom was “premature”. Everybody knew, I had just never done the math.

Not really. A family secret isn’t something about your family that you don’t learn about for a while. It’s something that is intentionally kept from you for some reason. There are countless facts about everyone in any family that you wouldn’t know because it had never been said to you, probably because there was never a time when it was relevant. There are other facts that people flat-out lie about, or keep hidden despite being something very important.

The idea that a sibling is a cousin seems like a big deal, but it’s also possible that in the parents’ minds since they raised that person as their own child that it is their child. It’s not something you hide, it’s just not something you talk about.

It’s like going to the bathroom; you’re not ashamed about defecating, everyone does it. But you don’t talk about it unless there is a reason to (for example you are in the middle of something and need to excuse yourself, or you have a stomach bug and need medical attention) because it’s not a polite topic. However it’s not like you’re keeping it a secret.

It also depends on how it’s revealed. If your parents sit you down as an adult and nervously tell you that your sibling is your cousin, then it’s obviously something that has weighed on them but they kept it concealed to ensure that sibling bond was intact, to prevent hurt feelings, to avoid shame, etc. If on the other hand it comes out in casual conversation and when you show surprise they shrug and say they didn’t realize they never told you, then it wasn’t a secret, just something they hadn’t bothered to bring up.

I hope so too. I find your hostility puzzling. You don’t know anything about me, my family, or what our lifelong relationships involved, or what larger, lifelong issues my parents’ behavior in the situations I spoke of might symbolize.

I mean sure, fair enough, it’s interesting to read your point of view. Food for thought and all that, I’m just slightly shocked at the intensity of your comments.

I don’t know about any family secrets, but depending on how a certain type of café au lait spots of the harmless sort (it seems) is genetically transmitted, there may be something I have little time left to find out. The story, in a nutshell, would be this: I have a big café au lait spot about where my liver is, I have had it all my life. My uncle (my father’s brother) has the same, in the same place, only bigger. My father did not. My uncle is around 80, we speak to each other once every two to four years, when I am in Barcelona, and never about private stuff. We were never close. Apart from him and his two kids, my cousins, and my brother, whom I don’t need to see or speak ever again, there is no family left. I guess it does not matter by now, if it ever did. But perhaps I am missing a good story.

Good, thanks.

True, my reaction was based only on what you wrote about what your mother and you said about this particular issue. I’m glad if I misinterpreted it, and will mind my own business about it henceforth.

Thanks for the gracious response. If it mitigates things at all, of course I didn’t say anything in my speech about the motivation for the marriage beyond that the nursing school didn’t allow married students - nothing about “they were horny and couldn’t wait, yuk, yuk.” Anyway, your comments made me think, which is rarely a bad thing.

I suspect one of my Uncle’s was a pedophile. He died unmarried and I never ever saw him with any sort of woman (or any partner in general) at family functions or at his home, but me and my sisters were under strict orders at family gatherings to never be alone with him and yell if you ever find yourself in that situation. Despite this every single adult in my family spoke highly of him and didn’t treat him weird at all besides the not being around kids stuff.

I initially thought he was a just a successful guy who kept to himself (he got into the computer programming business in the 70s and was able to live alone in a new house for all of when I knew him) until from random excerpts I pieced together from decades of conversations with others that my grandmother had unofficial child care at her house for neighbor kids to hang out after school until their parents got off from work, and that my uncle showed up at the house once to drop off some furniture and something happened when he was alone with some of the kids as he carried furniture in the house that immediately after my grandmother stopped her daycare and they had to pay some kids family a couple of thousand dollars to not press charges. Best case scenario he accidentally dropped a chair on some kids head.

When my brothers and I were kids, our mother told us that her parents had divorced over religion. She was raised by her mother and her three aunts.

After we were all adults, she informed us that her parents had never been married. Her mother had an affair with a married man, who refused to acknowledge the child.

This explained a lot about some of my mother’s mean, quirky behavior: growing up, we weren’t allowed to have friends unless both of their parents were living at home. Otherwise, “they might be bastards”. She was trying desperately to hide her painful secret by accusing others of having the same secret. Mom was born in the second decade of the twentieth century, and being born “illigitimate” carried a much bigger stigma then.

My parents own marriage had some odd trappings. For starters, my mother had been married to a friend of my father (“P”), a European immigrant 20+ years older than her. Before they married, “P” told her that he had a heart condition which might shorten his life. In the event that it did, he suggested that his friend “J” (also a European immigrant) was a good guy.

“P” did die after just a couple years of marriage. And mom ended up marrying “J” (my dad).

My father was 24 years older than my mother (55 when they married). They ended up having three kids, the last when he was 68 years old. His unusual sexual longevity has prompted me to wonder whether he had been married before meeting my mother. It seems improbable to me that a a man could be celibate until the age of 55 and then go on to father three (unplanned) children. I would think the social mores of the time would have made it tougher for him to be sexually active outside marriage (more so because he was a foreigner in a small West Virginia town, where he would have been persona non grata to a lot of women).

I thought it would have been cool to connect with half-siblings thirty years older than me. I suggested to my brothers that we look into it, but we never did. And I’m pretty sure any potential relatives are dead now.

I have two older half-siblings. Until I was 20, I thought my two older half-siblings had the same father. Nope. Older brother’s dad was one of my (non-biological) uncles. To give credit where it’s due, this uncle was a tall, good-looking guy, and the bigger surprise is that so far there aren’t more of these ‘surprises.’

My older sister (who was the one who set me straight on the above) knew absolutely nothing about her paternal grandmother other than her name, and that she had been previously married (and widowed) before marrying her grandfather. With DNA we found family relatives that showed she was almost certainly married to a neighbor before either of the two known marriages, and that marriage produced two children.

My wife was a surprise relative, as she was adopted. With DNA, she matched up to the daughter of one of her half-brothers, so I’m sure that was a surprise.

I think one of my close relatives was a pedo. Personally I believe it happened, which tainted my opinion not just of the relative, but of a bunch of other family members. . . who knew about it!

I’m potentially a surprise to a couple of people. I was a sperm donor in 1982 which potentially resulted in two pregnancies. I wish I hadn’t done it. At the time I was guaranteed lifetime anonymity. Of course, no one knew that DNA testing would advance so amazingly. My mom and sister signed up for Ancestry or 23 so now I’m findable if one of them exists and is curious. My hope is that they inherited my trait for strongly not wanting to know.

I believe that a great-uncle of mine may have been a pedo but I have no proof. He lived several states away but even as a small child I was drawn to the special attention he gave me when he was in town. When I was twelve, that same behavior gave me the creeps and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was 12, quite tall, and already in a bra and g-uncle was asking me to sit on his lap. Whaa? My parents were present and mom insisted I do so, so I did because, after all, he was my blood relative and I had always loved him. He didn’t try anything but with family present, it would have been tough.

I was told I was imagining things. Now that there’s a spotlight on pedo behavior, I’m quite sure I know why this behavior gave me the creeps and that my instincts were good. He passed on many years ago. There are still no whispers that I am aware of, but again, we lived several states away. I trust my instincts.