When my grandmother was 91 with dementia, she said my mother had been married before she met my father.
I dismissed it as something she’d imagined. Years later, my mom confirmed it – and also told me she’d had an
abortion in 1940.
Another pretty tame (by today’s standards) divorce story(no real names used):
My mother’s side of the family were very Catholic. Sometime in the early '80s, when I was in my mid-twenties, my mother and I were looking through an old photo album. On one page was an old wedding picture and she said “Aw look, that’s your Aunt Mary and Fred”. I said “Fred? who’s Fred?” As far as I knew Aunt Mary had always been married to Uncle Bob, but Mary was 15-20 years older than my mother and the wedding picture looked to be from the '30s. My first thought was maybe he died very young and Uncle Bob came along shortly after, a situation that had really happened to another of my aunts. My mother then said “Oh, I thought you knew”, and proceeded to tell me.
Aunt Mary and Fred were divorced(my mother actually whispered that word even though there was no one else in the house) in the late '30s. Uncle Bob didn’t marry Mary until the early '40s. My cousin Sue(Mary’s daughter) was actually Fred’s daughter, not Bob’s, and was adopted/had her name changed by Uncle Bob. That explained why I never saw Aunt Mary take Communion:)
Fast-forward about five years to shortly after my mother’s death. My grandmother and I were having lunch, and the conversation made me think of Aunt Mary’s history. I sort of blandly stated that I didn’t find out about Aunt Mary and Fred until a few years ago. My grandmother freaked out - turned red in the face, drew a deep breath, and said “NO! Who told you that?” I told her, and I think she would have killed my mother had she not already been dead. Grandma was in her 90s then, and her attitudes were still very Victorian. She made me promise not to tell another soul about it.
To this day I don’t know how much Aunt Mary’s family(or anyone else in my mother’s very large extended family) knows. Surely my cousin Sue would know, because she was at least 10 when Uncle Bob came along. Sue’s children are my age, and they now have grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I almost never see any of them, but when I do I am tempted to ask. But I promised Grandma, so I will never find out.
Bumping this because of the secret I found out about yesterday. Long into adulthood.
Mom’s heritage is boring. Italians all the way and not very exciting.
Dad’s family was a bit more interesting. Maternal side had both the poor Irish orphan travelling to America alone. Also the part of the family with the longest branches in the US. Paternal side was German. With a boring common German name that I share. Or so I thought.
My cousin pointed me to something he found on Ancestry. The 1920 census has the boring German name. In the 1910 census my grandfather has a last name that’s more Polish than kielbasa. Now apparently they did come from Germany but not ethnically German. Why they changed it right before it became unpopular to have a German name will take some research. Yes I’m doing the DNA test to see what pops up.
My family on my mom’s side is a hot mess, and I still really have no idea what’s going on with them.
I learned when I was 11 that I had two adult half-siblings I knew nothing about. Turns out Mom was actually married three (possibly four, can’t verify) times, not two. I only learned this because we were going to take a cross-country trip and my mom wanted to visit them. We got along okay briefly but never really clicked, and my mom (who loved to stir up trouble) stirred up enough jealousy of me in my half-sister that we haven’t spoken for like 30 years. I don’t care, honestly. I don’t have any interest in pursuing a relationship with them at this point. They’re virtual strangers. I contacted my half-brother to let him know Mom passed away, and he turned out to be super-religious and strange. So I left it at that, which is probably for the best.
My mom’s adopted mother hated her and treated her terribly. Turns out my grandfather, who we thought had died at 49 but was actually 71, had an affair with his secretary in Ireland and my mom was a result. He and his wife “adopted” her, and the wife/my grandmother always resented her. No idea what happened to Mom’s real mother. Also no idea how much of this is true, because my mom told so many stories about her early life that nobody could get a straight answer.
When my mom died in 2011, I got conflicting information about how old she was. I thought she was born in 1933, but it’s possible she could have been born as early as 1926. Or not.
All of this kind of fascinates me, but I have no real idea how to find out what’s true and what isn’t, since most/all the principals are dead at this point.
Infovore, here is the soundtrack of your life: Joe Walsh - Life Of Illusion - YouTube
Life of Illusion
Apparently something similar happened with my ex-wife’s family. Her father was supposedly adopted but apparently he was his father’s love child and the wife took him in.
Lessee…
My grandfather was a WWI draft dodger. His two sisters (my great-aunts) bought a farm and he ran it during the war years, thus putting himself into a reserved occupation, and, hence, exempt from the draft. My grandmother was a farm girl and wanted a farm husband. They married and then, when the war was over, he left the farm and returned to his actual occupation, builder. She wasn’t happy about that, but stayed with him until his death in 1971.
A great-aunt on a different side of the family (probably a first cousin twice removed, actually) had a husband who developed severe mental disorders and was institutionalized for life shortly after their marriage. She eventually met and fell in love with another man. However at that time and in that place, you were not able to obtain a divorce from a “crazy person”. So, she just lived with the guy. In the early 1930s. The family, of course, cut her off completely. When I met her, in the 1980s, she had only recently re-established contact with the family. Very nice old lady.
In contrast, my grandmother’s husband left her before my father was born in 1921. (I have seen her marriage license and his birth certificate, and, no matter what my mother says, my father was legitimate). She was granted a divorce on the grounds of abandonment seven years later, and thereafter conducted herself in the only respectable way possible at that time and place: She never had anything to do with another man, as far as anyone knows, for the rest of her life.
Finally, my second cousin was also estranged from the family from the 1970s to the early 2000s, due to her marrying a – gasp! – man of color (hard to believe I am related to some of these people).
I regret ever doing ancestry.com because I keep getting surprise adoptee cousins from my one young dumb cousin who apparently has a talent for seducing women and never using condoms. Chrissakes dude.
Whaddaya mean, “these people”? :dubious: 
Kind of a long tale with relatively little juice, but it’s not strictly incest if the brother & sister are adopted as infants from different parents, right?
People who would dlsown someone for crossing the race line, is my guess.
Which reminds me…I have an uncle whose first wife was Jamaican (that side of the family is more white bread than a Sunbeam factory). This was before my time, but my mom told me that when he first brought her to a family gathering, before the wedding, it was very much like the episode of Fresh Prince, where the one aunt introduces her white fiancé. “Gee, when Janice…described him…she didn’t mention that he was…er, tall!” In this instance, it was “We didn’t know she was…uh…from another country! Uh…wish we’d known she’s…not a native English speaker!” But no one stopped speaking to him/them, or refused to attend the wedding, and my guess it ended because she didn’t want to be so far from her family and he didn’t want to move with her to Kingston, not because of outside pressure.
When I was a teenager in the 70s, I found out one of our great uncles by marriage was murdered in New Orleans. He was married to one of my paternal grandfather’s sisters. As it turned out, he was in the mafia in New Orleans. He owned a few used car lots there. They came to visit my grandfather and grandmother a few times in the 60s and the only things I remember about him was how flashy he dressed and he wore some big rings on his hands. They always had loads of money … and apparently he’d been caught stealing some of that money from the mafia.
The story goes that one afternoon a man came by one of my uncle’s car lots to “test drive” a car. My uncle went with him and they never came back. The police later found the abandoned car with my uncle’s dead body stuffed down in the backseat. He’d been shot at point blank range in the head. My aunt had to move several states away from New Orleans because she kept getting visits from mafia men asking her “Where’s the money?” I remember her as a tough, no nonsense lady and she carried a big gun in her purse everywhere she went.
When I was in my 30s, one of my grandmother’s sisters passed away. We got to meet some of our cousins at the funeral that we’d never met before. They told us a story of one of our other aunts that was a bit coo-coo. She’d gotten pregnant as a teenager, managed to hide it from everyone during her pregnancy and then had the baby by herself out in the back barn. She then killed it and buried it out in the garden. A few days later, someone caught her back out there sobbing and laughing hysterically while digging the baby’s body up. 
Not as juicy as some of the others:
A few years ago, I was told that my grandmother committed identity theft… against my aunt.
My Aunt “Mary” was much younger than her siblings. My grandfather bought a lot of bonds, and designated that Mary would receive them upon his death. My grandmother was his second wife, and he told her about the bonds. So upon his death, grandma legally changed her name to “Mary,” and took the bonds. Legally, they were hers.
I honestly never suspected grandma as being smart enough to pull something like that off.