Wow, my family is either really boring, or really good at keeping secrets. The closest thing in a mystery in my family is whether my grandma’s youngest sister was named Margarethe or Katharina, or nothing. She died one day old and it was never officially written down. By the time anybody got around to doing a genealogy and asked, it turned into 85 year old women screaming at each other. The oldest living sister said she was born looking so sickly they expected her to die and never bothered naming her, which makes the most sense to me.
This has been a very interesting thread. Oh, I do have one cousin who was born “premature” and weighing 9 or 10 pounds…that isn’t a big mystery in the family though.
My first thought was bad moonshine, but botulism would be a good bet too. Or maybe raw milk…
This kind of thing was actually quite common (and sadly, still is).
My father disappeared when I was seven. He said he was going to walk to the store for some cigarettes and he never came back. A decomposed body was found in a creek two weeks later and he was identified by his boots. The official story is that he was murdered. But there were a lot of strange things going on during those two weeks. He was seen by my younger brother and sister when they were playing outside one day. They ran in to get my mother and when they got back out, he was gone. Then the Sunday before the body was found, he was seen standing in the back of the church by my mother and the preacher. He walked out and when they got outside, he was nowhere to be seen. My mother and my aunt (his sister) went out every night during the two weeks trying to find out what happened and ran in to all kinds of “characters” but could never find any real answers. The police were apparently not that interested in the case. It was never solved.
For the next dozen or so years, we got strange phone calls and cars would pull into our driveway at night and sit. We would call the police but they would leave before the police arrived. My aunt had men following her and even breaking into her house. I got a call when I was home alone from someone who asked me what I knew about death and when I asked who this was said “just say I’m a friend of your father’s”. There were just a lot of bizarre incidents including someone burning his grave site. After I left home, there was a time when someone was following me and not trying to hide it. I always wanted to get the police report about the murder but I was terrified that whoever had been involved would know.
Then at my sister’s wedding some years later, a cousin told me that he had knew something that had been bothering him for years. He said he was with his mother (my father’s other sister) when she picked up my father at work the day he disappeared and that he was crying and saying that he couldn’t handle the stress of family life. This actually made some sense to me. I’d always known things were not as they seemed. So now I wonder if he did not fake his own death. I’m 50/50 about it really.
I swear I could write a book. This isn’t even close to all the things that happened. And no, I have never asked my mother if she thinks her husband faked his own death and left her with three young children. I know I will never know.
Too late to edit the above post. In regards to faking his death, I think it’s possible that he had other reasons to want to disappear and that the men watching us all those years were trying to find out if we knew where he was. Like I said, I’m not convinced either way.
- My paternal grandfather knew basically nothing about his father’s family. It also appears that my grandfather’s father changed the family name from Kitchens to Kitchen somewhere down the line. I did some genealogical digging and found my ggrandfather’s parents living in Tennessee, and I know their names, but I haven’t been able to find anything beyond their names (I don’t know my gggrandmother’s maiden name). My grandfather was born in Illinois, so his father came up from Tennessee at some point, don’t know why. Although it IS possible that there was some kind of connection with the family of the woman he eventually married, because HER family came from Tennessee a generation earlier.
2.My maternal grandmother’s grandfather apparently had children by two sisters while he was married to the older one. When the older one died, he married the younger one. I found this out while digging through the family tree, and it upset my grandmother something bad.
3.My father’s maternal grandmother’s father and his brother lay in wait one day in Tennessee and shot and killed their sister’s husband. I would like to know why. My gggrandfather then took off with his family for Arkansas, and then Indian Territory, but his brother stayed behind in Tennessee and apparently never went to trial.
From reading a family genealogy, published in three separate volumes beginning about 30 years ago, I suspect that my same-surnamed ancestor of the time was in with the Jacob Leisler crowd; this ties in with the other theory that suggests conversion to Protestantism was a major factor in his father’s decision to depart from the old country. Leisler’s insurretion was put down in 1691, and though my ancestors remained in Lower Manhattan for some time afterwards, I’ve always wondered if this is why they decamped for Monmouth County, NJ, in the early 18th century. In the nine generations since – I come from a long line of younger/youngest sons – it seems most of them struck out further West.