Half of my family believes our grandmother had an affair and our youngest uncle was the illegitimate son of that union. The other half of the family collapses onto our fainting couches at the mere thought of our grandmother having an affair.
What was great-great-uncle doing during the Battle of Vicksburg? He was a war correspondent, and his diary covers the build-up of Union troops before the battle. Then there is a gap of some months, and the next entry is “Back home for hopping and plumming.”
My maternal grandmother was Jewish, but kept it hidden. When I worked on a family tree, it stopped at her and my grandfather. Birthplace on US Census listed as “England” for both of them. Don’t know any details, wish I could have gotten her to talk about it when she was alive.
When my mother was a little girl, her father and mother divorced. Her father remarried and took my mother to live with him and his new wife. They never spoke of, or saw her real mother or her sister again.
Her step-mother proceeded to beat her every day of her life. Step-monster and father had 2 children of their own, both boys, who she was fairly close to. They stopped speaking to her forever when she refused to attend her step-mother’s funeral years later (by that time her father had died, and her step-monster had remarried).
Although she tried, she was never able to locate her mother and sister (My grandmother and Aunt). It was complicated because my mother was born in Canada, and was brought to the states by her father.
Although my grandmother is most likely dead by now (she would be 105) my Aunt could still be alive today somewhere.
I wish I knew where my great-grandfather was from. He was born and grew up somewhere in either Switzerland or Germany, and then came to the US with his father as a teenager after his mother died, but I have no idea from where, and I haven’t been able to find out.
I know all sorts of things about all my relatives . . . except my paternal grandfather. Whenever family gets together, it’s not unusual to hear stories about those not in attendance, childhood memories, etc. But I’ve never heard any stories about that grandfather. My eldest aunt, months before she died at the age of 99, mentioned in passing that her father was “very strict,” then abruptly changed the subject. And my grandmother, who lived with us for a few years, and with whom I was very close, never even mentioned him, although they were married for 30+ years. Clearly, there’s some secret there, but everyone who knew him is dead now.
One of my aunts got out of the car her husband was driving and took off walking home. Her body was found on the banks of a drainage ditch a few days later. Newspaper articles at the time said her cause of death was unknown and investigations would continue. I was never able to find out exactly what happened to her. She was 48. If her children, my cousins, ever knew what happened to her they didn’t share, and I could never bring myself to ask. This happened in 1969.
Who is my uncle’s father?
Theories abound.
#1: His mother’s husband (duh)—grandma married a man 47 years older than she was. At the time of the birth, grandma was 21 & husb. was 68.
#2: One of that husband’s two brothers (they all lived together).
#3: Grandma’s own father.
The mystery is mostly because it’s so odd for a young woman to marry a man so much older than her if she didn’t “have to” because she was already pregnant and he was the only willing option. In any case, she never said what the circumstances were that prompted the marriage in the first place, which only lasted a few years (he died at age 71).
I suspect the husband was the father, and that she just married him to get out of utter, wretched, grinding mid-Depression poverty (though five years after the wedding, she was a widow with three kids under five, right back in poverty again). (Edit: in any case, we’ll never know.)
We always thought my maternal grandmother was a year older than my grandfather. She always said the courthouse where her birth records were housed burned down. She also said she had no middle name. One day my cousin goes to the new courthouse in that county because of his job, and inquires as to her records. Turns out she was born in 1888 instead of 1898, which made her 11 years older than her husband. She also changed her name, as the ones on the birth certificate didn’t match what she called herself. Verification of her original name was made through my mother’s birth certificate, which had her original name on it. She probably changed it because she had the same first name as my grandfather. We found all this out years after she died, so her gravestone has the false name and birth date on it.
Other than one time at a greater family gathering, I have never met a person not closely related to me (grandmother, uncle, nephew, niece, parents, siblings) with the same last name. There are others with the same last name in my hometown who are related to me. Somehow there was a split between brothers in my great great grandfather’s generation which led to the families not speaking to each other. Nobody now knows why.
My great-grands on my maternal grandfather’s side were poisoned. The only detail I was ever told was that they were poisoned and died when my grandfather was 12 and he was left caring for his younger brothers and sisters. He died before I was old enough to appreciate family stories. This would have been sometime in the 1920s in rural Tennessee. They were very poor sharecroppers so it likely wasn’t about money and likely wasn’t a jealous lover either, but who knows? It’s a mystery.
My great-grandmother was raised by a maternal aunt and uncle after her mother died in childbirth. It seems like a sad but familiar story from the late 1800s, a young widower unable to raise his newborn on his own, giving her over to a childless couple.
A few decades ago, a cousin with an interest in geneology decided to track down any descendants of my great-grandma’s birth father. Her aunt and uncle had apparently never formally adopted her, and she used both last names, so his identity didn’t seem to be a secret. My cousin ended up making contact with an elderly woman who seemed very alarmed. Why did my cousin want this information? What was she planning to do with it? And why, for the love of God, was she dredging up this awful story?!
My cousin finally managed to convince this woman that she had no nefarious purpose in mind (plus also it had been a hundred years and no one involved was still alive). With great reluctance, the elderly woman told her that there was some question as to my great-grandmother’s paternity. No surprise there. The surprise was that my great-great-grandmother’s husband had believed that his father was the one responsible, and that is why, when his wife died in childbirth, he gave the baby over to the mother’s family. What the exact circumstances were, and why he (and apparently his whole family) believed this to be true…a mystery.
We’re not entirely sure how old my grandma was - when she and my grandpa started dating, he told her that he was 20 years old. She was apparently trying to be smooth, and claimed to be 22, but Grandpa heard her say that she was “twenty, too.” So she just went with that. She didn’t have a birth certificate, but according to Social Security records, Grandma was born in 1902, making her 4 years older than Grandpa. That may still be incorrect, for all we know…
And we know the father, but not the mother, of my great-great grandmother. Apparently, shortly after the Civil War, my ggg grandfather had a job that took him throughout rural south Georgia, and he had a mistress in at least one little town 30 or 40 miles from his home. That young woman bore a daughter, but was unable to raise her at a certain point. (Maybe she was ill, or more likely, she had an opportunity to marry, but not with a bastard child hanging around.) At any rate, the mother apparently brought my gg grandmother to the father’s home, and just left her there with all of the other children. (My gg grandmother was about 2 or 3 years old at the time.) My ggg grandfather’s wife was apparently a saint, because the entire family agrees that Granny McDonald raised little Mary as though she were one of her own. (Census records have yielded a clue which may help us figure out where Granny Mary came from.)
The mystery I’m trying to trace right now really shouldn’t be all that difficult, but it’s surprisingly unyielding to my investigations. My husband’s maternal grandmother’s parents divorced around 1930. Both were socially prominent and well-to-do, living in Atlanta, sending their daughter to North Avenue Presbyterian school and then university and medical school. They lived in Ansley Park - Atlanta’s first automobile suburb. Both were descended from town founders, ministers, bank owners, elected officials, etc. My late grandmother-in-law only referred to her mother up until the time that “she left,” no further information. The last mention I can find of my husband’s great-grandmother, anywhere, is the 1937 Atlanta city directory, when she’d have been about 49 or 50. After that? No death record, no grave, no remarriage, nothing. (And she had an unusual name - not like finding a “Mary Smith.” Her name was Clyde Lovinggood McMillan - you’d think that would be pretty easy to trace!)
There’s also a great aunt who probably perished in the Texas City explosion in 1947. Apparently, she moved to the Galveston area during WWII, for a job of some sort. She and her sister, my great-grandmother, corresponded regularly until the spring of '47, and then nothing. We’ve never found any record of my great-aunt among the identified victims, but as a fairly new arrival, there may have been no survivor capable of identifying her.
My maternal grandmother had a mentally handicapped brother who lived with her, my grandfather, her sister, as well as my mom and her brothers - family took care of family that way back then. Uncle Joe functioned well enough to hold a job as a laborer within walking distance of home. (They lived in East Baltimore, and most of what they needed was within walking distance.) My grandmother would pack a lunch for her brother and send him off to work in the morning.
One day around lunchtime, Joe’s boss came by to find out where Joe was. (My grandparents didn’t get a phone till the 1970s - this happened in the 40s.) Joe had never gotten to work, and he was never seen again. I don’t know how diligently the police searched, but after 7 years, he was declared dead and that was that.
We have a few minor mysteries - such as exactly what happened in between the last time my father was seen conscious and found several hours later comatose, in his car, with a head injury from which he never recovered. We have some clues, but no answers.
The most peculiar such thing involves a close family friend, a woman around 40 who absolutely panicked if there was even a chance she was caught in a photo. My mother once took a group photo just as “Lee” walked by in the background and glanced that way, and it was a huge issue until she got the Instamatic cartridge back from a one-day photo shop and handed over both the photo and the negative. She was a late grad student and mysterious in many ways. Not likely to be WitPro, not in 1974 or so, and there was no indication she’d ever been married. Never have figured out that one.
Last year my sister’s brother-in-law killed his wife, three kids, then himself. From all reports he had a good marriage, lovely kids, and was happy at work.* – no one knows what happened, he didn’t leave a letter.
[SIZE=“1”]*He was a cop and used his service revolver[/SIZE]
In 2001 Two of my cousins on a deer hunting trip in a remote area were found dead in their tent. There were no signs of violence. One theory is they had a lit lantern in the tent and died of carbon dioxide poisoning; however, the lantern was found outside the tent; so, two more deaths in the family that are mysterious.
My grandparents, who were uber-Mormons, “had to get married” because grandma was pregnant (ca. 1915). Most of us grandkids didn’t know this until we were in our 30s.
The son they produced from this shotgun wedding was deer hunting with a friend who shot him in the back. He died a few hours later. His friend claimed that his rifle accidentally went off. There is some compelling evidence that it was actually premeditated murder (no arrest made). Sadly, grandma thought it was divine retribution for having extra-marital sex.
One lesson to learn is that deer hunting is lethal in my family 
I’d wager that 7-month babies were more common than 9-month ones through the time it became more acceptable to be having premarital sex. Now, a pregnant bride is seen as a stand-up couple (or at least a stand-up guy) instead of a moral shame.
“It was well known that an eager bride could accomplish in seven months what it took cow or countess nine.” - Robert Heinlein
Wow, Amateur Barbarian*. I could see that as an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
In the early 1900s, before my grandmother was born, two boys who would have been her (second?) cousins were found dead on the railroad tracks. It was ruled, by what evidence and early 1900s forensics I don’t know, that they had gotten drunk and lay down on the tracks and were subsequently hit by a train. I think they were about 14. My grandmother said her grandmother always insisted they were murdered.
As a kid I’d seen an episode of Gunsmoke or some other western where a dead or unconscious man was placed on the tracks with whiskey poured over him to give the smell of alcohol, and so when I heard the story of my cousins-twice-removed, I thought, “Yeah, if you want to kill someone and make it look like an accident, that’s a good way to do it.” Many years and too much reading of True Crime later, it occurred to me that it was a particularly effective method of destroying evidence not just of murder, but of rape. The bodies were so badly mangled by the train that they were buried in a single casket. I’ve wondered since then if those boys met up with some serial killer who was riding the rails.
*I meant what happened with your father and Lee, not the 7 month babies. And I am sorry about your Dad.
Thanks, but it was a long, long time ago. And it involves so many unlikely coincidences and missing pieces that it formed a large part of my understanding of how these “mysteries” get concocted in public perception.
For example, he might have survived the head injury and hematoma had he not been left on a hallway gurney for six hours… because he was mistaken for another “John T. Barbarian” who was a chronic drunk and ended up in that ER about once a week.
Or if a second emergency surgery to fix problems with the first had not been erased from the records.
And so on.
I just remembered one other mystery. My mother’s second brother was a bus driver and always a bit of a loudmouth. One day, he was drinking in a bar that wasn’t one of his usual haunts, and someone beat the crap out of him. Supposedly no one in the bar knew the guy who beat him and my uncle was just sitting quietly drinking (which wasn’t his usual style.)
He was beaten so badly, his dentures were broken, he sustained brain damage, and the guy stomped him in the chest so hard, it left a bootprint. The police never figured out who did it or why. This happened in the 70s - my uncle is still in the hospital, unable to care for himself. In fact, he can’t even sit in a chair unless he’s belted in an upright position.
I think the unspoken speculation is that either he mouthed off once too often to someone who followed him that day and attacked him, or he was hitting on someone else’s wife/girlfriend and set off a jealous rage. He’d been married 5 times, so that scenario was plausible. But we’ll never know.
The mystery in my family is just how many children my maternal grandmother’s father had and whether or not he was actually married to Gran’s mom. We all knew that Gran is one of nine full siblings and she had one half-sister who was raised as their cousin. Gran’s dad’s first wife died in childbirth and he gave his daughter to his brother and his wife to raise. Several years later he re-married Gran’s mom and fathered nine kids with her.
Gran is one of the youngest and only has one sibling still living. Gran had lost touch with several of her older siblings and wanted to find out what had happened to them, so my cousin started digging into the family history.
Turns out in those several years between wife #1 and what we thought was wife #2 Gran’s dad had married another woman and had two daughters with her… that we know of. My cousin got in touch with the family of one of the daughters and she mentioned the possibility of yet another half-sibling. Cousin is still digging into that one.
Cousin found the marriage records of Gran’s dad and the real wife #2 but no record of divorce or annulment. According to wife #2’s family she died several years after Gran’s dad would’ve married wife #3, Gran’s mom. There are marriage records for Gran’s dad and mom but now we wonder if Gran’s dad was a bigamist.
The family of wife #2 never knew what happened to Gran’s dad. It was shocking enough for us to find out that Gran had two and maybe three half-siblings she never knew about. I can only imagine finding out that you have 10 half-siblings you never knew about!