When I was sixteen, my father and I were going through my Grand-daddy’s things. And I came across his box of old coins. Looking through them, I found a bunch of coins from 1930’s France and Germany.
I asked my father about them, he told me they were from when my Grand-daddy was a merchant marine. I was floored by this. I knew he played baseball in the twenties, and worked for the NC Highway department in the forties.
It turned out Grand-daddy was a merchant marine only in the loosest sense. He and a buddy joined a crew and sailed to europe, and jumped ship. They bummed around France and Germany for about a year. When they decided it was time to come home, they went to an American consolate, and told them they were poor Americans trying to get home, and were there any ships which would give then passage which they could work off?
The consul found a ship for them… the same one they jumped. No word on how the passage home was.
If grandparents count, hearing from her own mouth that granny had had an abortion was a huge shock.
A generation removed from my parents, but I just found out that one of my grandfather’s brothers was died in an insane asylum. When my sister told me she was very suprised I didn’t know. The poor man probably either had a brain tumor or schizophrenia. He had been the most mild-mannered of men but became increasingly abusive, to the point of being dangerous to his wife and kids.
Rather touching…I found out my father learned to swim the very hardest way possible during his miliitary training for WWII. He was very close to his only brother, who was in the Navy. Dad wanted to join the Navy too but much to his disgust the Army snagged him because of this telecommunications skills. Both he and my uncle ended up at Fort Ord CA prior to being shipped overseas to the Pacific theater. Dad had a chance to ship out on my uncle’s ship but soldiers had to prove they could swim before being sent. My dad never swam a stroke in his life. He got at far back in the line at the swimming pool as possible and watched what other guys did. When it came his turn he just sort of fell headfirst into the pool and managed to dog paddle his way across. And he got to ship out with his brother.
Oh, and my dad took a photo of my mother in the late forties that was so good the Kodak company contacted him to buy it for an ad. Mom didn’t like the idea so it never happened, but we still have the slide. And it is gorgeous.
Veb
There are a bunch, but I’ll snip the more melodramatic ones. Not that my family is especially scandal-ridden, but anyway:
Four years ago, while she was dropping me off at college and we were out for dinner, my (somewhat stereotypically Jewish) mom mentioned to me that she didn’t really believe in god. Then she told me about a trip she took to Israel in high school with a youth group. She implied that she and a friend had been stoned the whole time, and that the friend brought home a brick of hashish. She used to be more interesting. 
When I found a bag of grass in my dad’s desk a few years ago, it should’ve been the world’s biggest “duh” moment. But it was surprising to see the proof right there in front of me. These days it’s an open secret in my immediate family: either doesn’t care to hide it anymore, or does such a bad job of hiding it that we think he’s not even trying. 
My dad’s been into the Allman Brothers since 1971 (and he got me into them when I was 14), so it was a great shock when he told me he’d actually met Duane Allman once. You’d think that’s something he’d have mentioned kind of early on, right? Nope. Anyway, he saw Duane and Gregg play a show at a hotel in Miami in 1968, before there was an Allman Brothers Band. He was wasted and rested his head on Duane’s amp for a while, with Duane’s permission. Eventually Duane told him to move on. But at least he did get to exchange a few words with a guy who, it turned out, meant a lot to both of us. I’m glad for that, and as usual I’m misting up thinking about it.
It’s not earth-shattering, but after my dad died, I found some old security paperwork (he was in the Air Force) where he’d confessed to smoking pot on occasion socially in college, and he regretted it and had NO desire to EVER do it again.
I don’t know why I was so surprised, he was at college in the early 70s. But it still strikes me as rather funny.
There is one story I’ve picked up bits of here and there over the years. I don’t really care enough about it to ask my parents what it was about, but from what I heard they knew some people a bunch of years ago and something happened between those couple people (not my parents). The FBI was involved and my parents were both asked a bunch of questions because they knew the people. Don’t know what happened, just that they don’t know those people anymore.