Just what I was thinking.
My guess is that this is the plot to The Glass Menagerie, since Tennessee Williams came up in this discussion.
Whoops, got that wrong, but it is likely a reference to a play.
Until last year I had never heard a single word about my older half-brother contracting HIV. This was in the early 1980s and he caught it by blood transfusion when the blood banks hadn’t perfected their screening procedures yet. It was the final nail in his marriage’s coffin. The miracle is that he’s still alive; he lived with HIV for years, expecting to die anytime in the next 18-24 months before the antivirals became available. Apparently he was one of a tiny percentage of people that the disease progressed more slowly than usual.
One of my grand-grandparents has a German name in one of the common “Jewish” German forms (which are of course shared with other Germans as well) but I never thought much about it until one of my relatives got a gene-test result that said he was 2% Jewish-ethnicity by DNA, which makes me wonder if I should get one too to see if the test result was just a fluke (not that it would change anything.)
It’s Streetcar Named Desire.
Marlon Brando.
Evidently, Aunt Lu was gay.
Not super juicy, but when I was in grade school it was told to me that we were related to General Custer. Apparently we weren’t proud of it.
Didn’t think about it much until I was poking around on ancestry.com a couple years ago. I was digging back through my dad’s, mom’s, dad’s family (if I recall correctly) and sure enough, there’s a woman buried in the Iowa cemetery that part of the family settled in who was born a Custer, in the Carolinas with all the other Custers. Couldn’t quite make a solid connection, but I’m pretty sure she was a niece of G.A.
Kind of a silly thing to be all hush hush about.
To my utter shock, my mom told this past fall that she was briefly married to someone else before she met and married my dad. My sister found out 30+ years ago when my dad (with some liquor to loosen his tongue) spilled the beans to her.
Missed the window…or was it Kentucky…
My great-grandfather (GG) was a devout Catholic, but he married a Protestant girl in a secular ceremony. She was 17 years his junior. He lied to her about his age, dropping three years, which made him three years younger than his twin sister, whom he banished from his life. I may be the only relative who knows his true birthdate. The altered birthdate appears on his tombstone.
The couple had three children. My grandmother was the third and renamed nameless for almost a year before the mailman gave her a name.
GG became obsessed with the fact that the Catholic Church did not recognize his marriage and that his children were thus illegitimate in the church’s eyes. He was told he was welcome to marry his wife in a church ceremony. This was not satisfactory to him; he spent many years harassing church officials and was eventually excommunicated.
At age 76, GG committed suicide. The official family story is that he was driven mad by his battle with the Catholic Church. That may be true, but I favor the far less popular story that his wife had gone blind and he was unable to care for her, but she would not leave him. Once he was dead, she went to live with my grandmother.
I recently found out that an uncle who died a couple years ago was pretty sure that is youngest son(who died a long time ago in his 20s) wasn’t his son, but he never told anyone but my dad, who told me after uncle’s death.
Not a big deal, but it does give me a queasy feeling when I meet my other cousins wondering if they know, and knowing I have no point in telling them, but I’m not sure that I have the right to not tell them the truth either.
It surprises me how common it is for people to not mention previous marriages. My grandpa’s second wife has been my grandmother since birth, and I was in my teens before she ever mentioned having a previous husband. She first married at 16, I guess? She is twenty years my grandfather’s junior. I’m sure there’s a hell of a story there.
My father-in-law’s second wife still won’t tell him certain things. It’s not a direct criticism, but I find it really odd. I can’t imagine wanting to marry someone without knowing everything about them. That’s what intimacy is to me. But they are apparently fine just living in ignorance.
I don’t think I’ll be able to keep anything from my kids, either. Age-appropriate, of course, but I kinda feel like a big part of knowing who someone is, is knowing the experiences that shaped them.
I come from two very different families. My father’s side is very well-off and proper, while my mother’s side is the exact opposite.
After my maternal grandmother passed last year we found out that my grandfather (who had passed a few years before) was for a time an enforcer for the Irish mob. This was done through the local unions during the late 60’s and 70’s, but nobody ever wanted to talk about it until my G-ma was gone.
I was born in 1962, so as long as I could remember, my paternal grandparents were together, we spent Sunday afternoons afternoons after church at the Hopkins Club, they were at all the family events, holidays were spent at their place in Roland Park…every now and then, someone would mention, “Sue” (not her real name), the first time I took notice of a mention of her when I was a child and my mother, in passing, said something to the effect, “Oh, you don’t remember Sue, she held you as a baby, but she died a year later…”
My grandparents had two children (my father and aunt) before WWII…during the war, my grandfather was an Army Air Corp pilot who served in Australia for three years flying Catalina reconnaissance planes over the South Pacific…he didn’t see much action, well, at least not as it pertains to combat…
My grandfather passed in 1970, and my grandmother in 1981. Shortly after, my mother and I were discussing grandmom, and again, Sue’s name came up, I said, “Wait, WHO was Sue??”
So, my married grandfather set off for war, was sent to Australia as a pilot, met an American nurse, and when the war was over, brought his new wife back to Baltimore…which was a shock to his wife (my grandmother) and his children…
They divorced, my father was raised by his mother but saw his father, (that explains the strained relationship they had), my grandfather pretty much expected everyone accept Sue into the family and evidently, they complied…
After Sue passed away, my grandmom, who had remained single for 18 years, took my grandfather back and they lived in sin (two divorcees) until he passed away in 1970…and no one said a word…
OK, maybe a ‘4’ on the juicy scale, but that’s our family’s little uncomfortable secret…
There were a fair number of Germans who emigrated after WWI. There was a bit of a socialist uprising in Germany after WWI, but then when Germany started going nationalist, they left for Russia. And then many of those got out of Russia if they could before/after WWII.
My father and his first wife divorced because she was cheating on him with her current husband while he was deployed in Germany in the mid-70s.
My grandfather’s first wife died of cervical cancer a couple of years after they married. A few years later he married my grandmother, who was 3 months pregnant. They had 6 children … none of them fathered by him. He never had sex with her because he believed that he was responsible for his first wife’s death. After he died (after a long marriage) she married the father of her children… who didn’t know he was their biological father until, shortly before she died, she told them
While my mother’s side of our family has been traced back to very Early New England, we’ve since found out that what our father told us about his family (parents dead, no siblings) is totally bogus. He apparently got my mother pregnant, stayed with her for ten years and (five children later), left one day and disappeared. All efforts to find him or trace his family based on what he told us have failed.
Weird, that.