I posted this big secret 5 years ago:
I just found out that Darth Vader is my father.
Well one time while having dinner with my parents at Red Lobster they started talking about how they used to have to drive to a different Red Lobster in neighboring city before the one we were eating at opened. Then my mother let it slip that they celebrated my father’s divorce there, then she got this awkward look on her face as soon as she realized what she said and quickly changed the subject. Also one of my -great-great-uncles was an army officer who ended up retiring early because his German wife “threw wild parties”, but I found that out as teenager and have never been able to get any more detail on it. In retrospect I suspect swinging may have been involved.
Not all that shocking today and not that shocking then it seems, but my mother and her cousin were both born 7 months after my Gma and her sister got married. According to Gma herself, it wasn’t uncommon in this area or our family at least for firstborn to be born “a little early” at thst time
I found out when I was a child that my grandmother had been raised in an orphanage (I was on a visit to her with my dad when he was in his 40s, which was when he first found out! It always boggled me how he apparently never asked when he was a kid where his grandparents were).
But it wasn’t until about 15 years ago that I started investigating further, upon which I discovered that a) my grandmother quite possibly lived in the U.S. illegally from 1930 until her death in 2006; and b) the reason my grandmother and her siblings grew up in an orphanage was because her mother was mentally ill, and her father had essentially abandoned the family. (I am the great-granddaughter referenced in the link who finally dug up the records from the National Archives.)
My Zayda (grandfather) died 6 years before I was born. Soon after he died, my Dad and Aunt went through their parents’ papers. Now, Bubbe (grandmother) and Zayde were still greenhorns when they got married. They got a marriage license in Philadelphia where they lived, but they got married by a Rabbi they knew across the river in New Jersey. After Dad and Aunt Mildred looked at the papers and digested them, so to speak, Dad said to Aunt Mildred “I guess you know what this makes us?”
Your husbands family history isn’t that uncommon, and probably nothing shameful about it either. My GreatGramma was german, but she came from Russia as the family had been migrating around Eurasia for a while.
My grandfather father died of cancer when I was eighteen. All his life he wished that he had siblings, but he was his parents’ only child.
Scratch that. He was his father’s only child.
His mother finally died of Alzheimer’s four months after he did. A few weeks after that my mom and aunt found another birth certificate, and a death certificate, for an older sister he never knew existed. The girl died as a toddler a couple of years before my great-grandmother met my great-grandfather.
This made a little more sense of strange things that she did to my grandfather, including putting his hair in banana curls and dressing him like a girl until he was seven or eight, decades after boys and girls were dressed differently in the US.
These are mostly things I learned as a late teen and young adult and some others that have slowly come out over the years.
My mother was 15 when she got pregnant with me in 1962 (I was born in 1963), my father was 16. Mama was from a “disgraced” family because her parents had divorced in the late 50s and my grandfather got custody, so you know it was bad. Her mother, Mayree (my grandmother) was known all around town as a fallen woman. What she really had was untreated bipolar disorder and she self-medicated with alcohol, so yeah, she was a hot mess. A gorgeous red-headed hot mess, but a hot mess just the same who partied hard and had a rich Sugar Daddy named Will Woodcock. You simply CANNOT make this up.
My father was from one of those old money families that goes all the way back to the back to the Revolution and War Between the States, and his parents, Big Momma and Big Daddy, yes, just like in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, were mortified that their son had gotten such a girl “in trouble”.
Mama’s trouble didn’t come out until she was about 6 months along because she used a long line strapless bra that she had cut the cups off of as a corset-type contraption around her middle to conceal it. The Home Ec teacher figured it out, and placed a very memorable call to my grandfather at work.
I found out there were several plans bandied about as to what should be done. Big Momma was pissy and supposedly said, “Why didn’t you tell us sooner? We could have secured an abortion!” Thank goodness for that homemade corset, or my ass wouldn’t be here.
Mayree had an equally wild and alcoholic sister named MatyBelle who had herself been in a similar situation in the 1940s and couldn’t conceive due to her own botched back alley abortion, and she and her husband were frothing at the mouth to raise me as their own. Thankfully, that fell through, because, really…they were living in New Jersey of all places. The very thought makes my skin crawl!
My grandfather felt a closed adoption would be best, so he packed my mother off to the Florence A Critendon Home for Wayward Girls and refused to tell my young father where she was. My mother’s sister told me how he would come by the house and beg granddaddy to tell him.
Enter Mayree, who tells my father where my mother is, and promises them both that if they will get married she will help them and give them all the support they need, because she can’t bear the idea of the baby being adopted away from the family. Cuz you know, she’s rolling in all that good Woodcock money and was living in quite high style at the time. 
So at 8.75 months preggers, my mother married my father and subsequently the 3 of us move in with Mayree. Things go along alright for a bit until my parents come home from school one day and find me in my crib in a terrible state, having been crying for what appears to be hours with a soaking wet diaper. Mayree was passed out on the bed. She drank my father’s bottle of Lectric Shave.
They moved out and had to depend on the charity of his family who hated my mother, and soon enough they were divorced, as one would expect.
The crazy thing about both of the these grandmothers from my perspective is that I felt very loved and adored by both of them. I am glad I never knew for a long time about Big Momma’s abortion comment because I know that once I was here, she doted on me as if I hung the Moon in the Sky. Same with Mayree, for all her problems.
Families are complicated.
I don’t get it. What did it make you?
When I was working on my mom’s family tree, I discovered her mom had a sibling no one (alive) knew about. She was not on the 1900 or 1910 federal census, but was on the 1905 city census, aged 5. My mom was adamant she knew her family, it must be an error. The Polish church her mothers family attended is still around, I hope to be able to travel there and check it out.
On dad’s side: I knew my aunt’s marriage was not very good - her husband was an alcoholic with anger management issues. I found out, not long before she passed, that she spent a little time in jail for stabbing him with an ice pick. He didn’t die and the courts decided it was self defense. They stayed married until he did die, more than a decade later.
My paternal grandfather was an alcoholic; this was never revealed to me until I was in my 40s (he died when I was 5).
My father then told me that, during WWII, when everyone was under lots of social pressure to buy war bonds, he’d buy the bare minimum that he could get away with at work, and then cash them in as soon as possible, so he could spend the money on liquor.
He was permanently disabled in a car accident in the early 1950s (he then lived until 1970), which was apparently what would now be classified as a DUI incident. My father was in college at the time, and had to drop out after his sophomore year, due to the family’s income being cut by the injury. My father then enlisted in the Army, to qualify for the GI Bill and finish his schooling after he got out.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ranger Jeff View Post
My Zayda (grandfather) died 6 years before I was born. Soon after he died, my Dad and Aunt went through their parents’ papers. Now, Bubbe (grandmother) and Zayde were still greenhorns when they got married. They got a marriage license in Philadelphia where they lived, but they got married by a Rabbi they knew across the river in New Jersey. After Dad and Aunt Mildred looked at the papers and digested them, so to speak, Dad said to Aunt Mildred "I guess you know what this makes us?
Jewish?
Dennis
Not a secret, but a fact of life in the early 1800s. I was going though the will filed by one of my ancestors in the Long Island area in early 1800s. Among his possessions was his “house servant” (slave) named George. He willed George to his son. If George were to pre-decease his death, the son got an extra $50. The value of a person in 1800.
Dennis
I have two secret siblings. Everyone else in the family knew.
I was thinking illegitimate - their parents got the marriage license in one state, then they got married in a different one.
Damn, this would make one hell of a black comedy!!
I was born when my father was quite old. I only knew him in his declining years.
When the Germans invaded Norway, he was working in the merchant fleet in foreign ports. Like all of the merchant fleet outside Norway, he joined the allies, and spent WW2 doing a variety of tasks. Mostly on navy vessels, but including some Special Forces work. During WW2 he was mostly out of contact with his family in Norway except for two heavily censored letters, and he had not yet met mom. He has told us many stories, including how he was decommissioned in Bergen in the spring of 1945, palmed his handgun and knife, intending to keep them for souvenirs but sold them and gambled and partied the money away. (This did not sound like my father, but then again, I only knew him as an old man). He died in 1997.
A couple of years back, the UK decided that there would be medals for people who ran the arctic convoys with supplies to Murmansk during the war. I figured we’d apply, children of soldiers can apply. So I sent off to the national archives for his war records. There was… a surprise.
First off as a point of interest, soldiers were graded by their superior officers, on a scale of 1.0 to 5,0 - 5 being the worst. Many officers had graded my father, and he must have had one of the highest averages in the nation. Mathematically, there is no other option. Damn, old man I knew you got a lot of medals but…
Second… the story he told about being decommissioned in Bergen in '45 was total bunk. Didn’t really sound like him anyway. Instead, what is in the papers is another line of service until the autumn of 1946. Written in Edinburgh, it is unlike all the other service lines in the document in several ways. The witnessing officers signature is only initials (M.D.K.). The signing officers signature is an unreadable squiggle. (Mac something?) And the nature of the service line… is left blank.
What did he do in the military from may 1945 to the autumn of 1946. No one knows. It is clearly a family secret which only he knew. Maybe it is juicy, I do not know.
Russia had a sizeable German minority up until WWII. Those that weren’t sent to Gulags to die were forceably deported in 1945.
I thought his secret shame was being a New Jerseyite by birth.
I’m surprised you would admit that in public.