Yes. My paternal ancestors emigrated from what is now the Ukraine but was Russia when they left in the 1870s. They had been there about 100 years, coming from Switzerland, where their native tongue was German. They were still speaking German when they came to America, and continued to speak that language until World War I.
Why not tell them? I’d be thrilled to find out I had a half-sibling.
It’s possible they already know, but if they do, they haven’t told the rest of the family. More likely, it’s possible that their Mom knows but doesn’t want them to find out. Either way, I don’t think it’s my place to tell them.
This is something I discovered after my Mom died, so I couldn’t ask her if she and her other siblings knew when my aunt got married.
I discovered that my grandfather’s first language was probably Swedish (based on census records: his three older siblings’ was, and he was only 14 months younger). And he never could pronounce “th” correctly in English. Wish I had known to ask him about it! His maternal grandparents were from Sweden.
Yeah, a lot of them were relocated by Stalin to Central Asia.
I’ve been looking at a great uncle’s family this week.
His grandfather, Asia, was born to an unmarried 16-year old mother. Asia’s grandparents raised him as their son and it’s not clear if he just maintained the fiction or if he went his whole life without knowing the truth: his sister, Lucy, was really his mother.
During WWII, Asia was stationed in Europe and in 1917, he married an English lass, Gertrude. In 1920, Asia and his bride returned home to Australia - but the woman traveling with him as Gertrude was not the woman he married. Family lore says she was Alice, and she posed as Gertrude so they could get free passage under the repatriation scheme.
English records show Gertrude living out her life in the UK, taking the surname of another man, having children and ultimately passing away in the 1970s. Meanwhile, Australian records show Gertrude and Asia having children, living out their lives, and passing away in the 1960s.
I was chatting with my father on Christmas Eve, telling him that I had been doing some Wikipedia-diving on the history of La Cosa Nostra in Cleveland. I was surprised to read that at the time we lived there, an Irish-American mobster named Danny Greene was involved in a gang war with the Jewish and Italian mob, that only ended when he and a Hungarian-American boss named Shondor Birns were killed in separate car-bombings.
Dad then casually mentioned that when he was a very young man who had just moved to Cleveland, one of the tenants of his building was a wannabe mafioso whose brother was an associate of the Cleveland family, and this guy took Dad to some sketchy places, including one of Birns’ bars. The story ended up with Dad hauling the wannabe tough guy out of an illegal brothel, after a sex worker pulled a knife on him.
The idea of my Dad being in a brothel - even incidentally, and not as a client - is somewhat mind-blowing. As is the notion of him being even tangentially associated with the Mob.
I’d be proud to be descended from a stone badass like your gg-grandmother, too. Sounds like an amazing woman.
At the last family reunion (which was 2019, but for our purposes I’ll count it as “recent”) I learned about the baby in the rock pile.
My mother’s paternal family homesteaded in northern Montana ca. 1905. My grandfather was born in IIRC 1927 and was one of 8 kids. In 2019 only one sibling, his younger brother, was still alive.
He told us a story of his aunt, so my grandfather’s father’s sister (no clue what that relationship would be to me) giving birth to a baby in 1917 or 1918, in the dead of winter. The baby only lived a few days. Because the ground was far too cold to dig, they put the baby’s body under a large pile of rocks at the edge of a wheat field. Once the ground warmed up the family decided to leave the baby’s body where it was rather than move it to a proper cemetery. I find that strange since they were devout Catholics, but that’s what happened.
Today the location of that specific rock pile is long lost. However the homestead house – a shack, really – they lived in is still standing and the land is, I believe, still in the family. Perhaps that rock pile remains with a little pile of human infant bones buried deep underneath.
I had a six greats grandfather who fought in the American Revolution. He got court-martialed when Lafayette came over with the French auxiliaries and my ancestor wouldn’t fight alongside them. His family was Protestant and they were Catholic. He got pardoned later on, they needed soldiers so badly. My aunt wanted to join the DAR and finally got all the documentation she needed, but she needed to apply under that guy, who wasnt exactly a shining star.
And hundred thousands of them relocated from places like Kazakhstan to Germany in the 90s after the fall of the Soviet Union. They have a funny and peculiar accent, old-timey German with a slight Russian color.
There’s a Catholic church here in town that was founded by German speaking Russians.
I worked with a woman from Kazakhstan who was a German Russian, her parents immigrated to Germany.
I’ve known about this one for a while, but I have a five-greats grandfather who fought in the Revolution, and reached the rank of Captain. He came in 1775, and family legend was that he came to America specifically for the opportunity to fight against the English (he was Irish, of course).
I found this out about 2 years ago. She used the same genealogy company that I had, and she showed up as either 1st or 2nd cousin. She was adopted, so highly likely she was born out of wedlock, as we used to say. I got in touch with the one 1st cousin I’ve stayed in touch with, and neither of us could figure out who her link with our family was. She’d need either more relatives submitting their dna, or someone saying something. I was happy to acknowledge her as family, but she’s 3k miles away and 40 years younger than me, so we haven’t kept in touch.
Years ago my mom told my sisters and I that she had had her tubes tied shortly after our brother was born. She was Catholic and thought it was a shameful thing to admit. She practically whispered it to us. None of us thought there was anything at all wrong with it. Her obgyn was Catholic, too, but he told her that if got pregnant again, she would die. I’d known she had a serious hemorrhage after my brother was born, but I hadn’t realized she’d returned to the hospital for the sterilization procedure. C’mon, mom, nothing to be ashamed of! When my brother was born, my older sister (the oldest of four) was still 5 yos. How would my dad have coped?
Long story made short: A while back, I met a woman who many years before had placed a son for adoption, and when he located her, she gave him information about his birth father, because he knew his father would want to meet him. (BF had wanted to marry her, but she did not want to marry him even though he was a good man, and they made a mutual agreement to never see each other again.) He located his father’s widow - his father had died about 10 years earlier - and she told him that while she knew about this son who had been adopted out, they had never told their own 4 children and did not want them to know, and had reasons for not telling them, and “please do not contact me again.” So, they had to respect that.
Due to genetic genealogy, I found out a while back that I have two more 3rd or so cousins than I thought I did. My 2nd (or so) cousin, who died in 1964 at the age of 40, had 4 kids with his wife - and it turns out, 2 of the 4 kids his neighbor had were not fathered by her husband. These kids were playing with their half-siblings and did not know it! However, it turned out that “they” knew this, but apparently their spouses did not. Whether either of them suspected an affair is also unknown.
I have a direct maternal ancestor who lived to be 101. 1750 to 1851, which is pretty remarkable in itself.
I don’t know if any of my distant ancestors took up rebel arms in the Revolution, but except for my maternal grandfather’s father, who came over from England in the mid/late 1800s, my mom’s side of the family traces back to Colonial Cape Ann in Massachusetts. A few years ago I was going through some ancestral research my late mother had done and came across a last name now borne by a person living in the same town where I do.
Well, in her day it for sure something to be ashamed of. After all, sex was for procreation, not fun (for a decent woman, anyway), and a wife had a duty to serve her husband’s needs, right? I’m glad her doctor put her health and life ahead of Catholic doctrine.
It was the grandfather of that fighter in the Revolution that first came to this side of the Atlantic. He and his wife had four sons and four daughters. I am descended from one son and last year had email contact with a man I discovered was descended from another of the sons. We are seventh cousins once removed. Another man descended from a third son was prominent in government in the later 1800’s. He was ambassador to Austria-Hungary, asst. Postmaster General, and member of Congress. I worked it out he was my third cousin five times removed.
I had known since I was little that my mother’s parents got divorced when my mom was a teenager. My grandfather, a large, quiet Swedish man moved to Michigan’s UP to work in the iron mines. My grandmother moved with 3 of her 4 children to Alamogordo New Mexico with her new husband. My mother, having just graduated from high school chose to stay behind in SW Michigan.
I also knew early on that my mother was not on speaking terms with her mother. We had visited my grandfather a few times in the UP. He had gotten re-married to an adorably tiny woman whom my brother and I were not allowed to call Grandma but were told only to call her Katie. My mom’s mother, we only visited once when I was 8 years old. I have only the haziest of memories of her.
I thought the story of my Grandparent’s divorce might have died when my mother passed at the age of 50 in 1989, of cancer. Then a few years ago my dad was visiting, having a few martinis and telling tales of days gone by. I asked him if he knew this part of family history.
Well, he said, taking a sip of his drink, “I guess this story can be told now. Back in the late 50s, you’re grandmother was known to be a bit of a party girl and was tired of the life of a homemaker. Your grandma’s bar of choice was at the local bowling alley, where she met the answer to her dreams. She became the girlfriend of a small-time pro bowler and decided to follow him around on the mid-west circuit, dragging her three daughters with her, staying in a string of seedy no-tell motels along the way. Leaving her only son behind with your grandpa.”
We definitely never called my grandma’s second husband Grandpa. I can understand my mom’s estrangement with her mother, given that story. It sounds like a Coen Brothers movie.
My dad’s family history sounds more like a Steven King tale. But, that’s a story for another time.
I knew as soon as I could understand the concept that my dad’s parents had divorced. My grandfather ended up being married seven times. Coincidentally, as a middle-aged man involved in the Toastmaster’s program, my dad became friends with one of my grandfather’s ex-wives. My dad was a junior, so it was obvious my dad was her ex’s son.
My dad was really bitter about it and cut his dad off. He thought his dad was a jerk who abandoned his wife and family. And he had, apparently. There was no contact for the rest of their lives. Oh, and my mom and dad got their marriage license on the day my grandmother was in divorce court.
I once saw a snapshot of my grandfather that my aunt had, but I never saw anything else to let me know what he looked like.