I personally don’t have much curiosity about why my ancestors did one thing and not another, but I’m pretty sure I’m in a minority on that. So I really didn’t think much about unanswered questions, particularly those that are suggested by fragmentary clues that ARE left behind. Ironic that my college minor was history.
Ah, if I ever do invent the Past Time Viewing Machine, the real money won’t be in looking over the shoulder of Jesus, it will be in watching what Grandpa Jack was doing when he was out of the house.
I am convinced I am going to find a secret when my parents pass away, and it’ll be that my mom was raped. Just the way she’s overprotective and speaks about certain things gives me a vibe that she was hurt by a guy in the past.
My father-in-law died a month after his divorce had finalized but before he and the ex-wife (my husband’s mother) had exchanged the personal property. Me and my husband had to gather the requested items from the list and pack them up for her to pick up.
One item on the list was ‘copies of family photos and negatives’ so we hauled out the fifteen photo albums and started going through them to match up the negatives to the pictures, check for duplicates, etc. We each grabbed a photo album and started flipping through them.
I had just found a lovely photo of my mother-in-law laying in the bed of a pickup truck with her skirt hiked up and her legs spread Hustler style (she had panties on) when I heard my husband scream “OH MY GOD!” and fling an album away like it was on fire.
Turns out that my father-in-law was quite the amateur photographer and my mother-in-law quite the eager model. For some reason, when my mother-in-law placed photos in the albums, she mixed up the family pictures with the nudes. Trip to Maui, Trip to Santa Fe, MIL naked under a waterfall, trip to Yuma, MIL with her bikini pulled to the side flashing her pelt, etc.
I got the lovely duty of going through each album and removing any questionable pictures, then handing them over the my husband. Every album had some nudes in it and there was one just solely dedicated to nudes. The all nudie album was the worst of all, since a lot of the shots were done in costumes with accessories done all over the house and yard.[sup] (There was a series where she was wearing a cowgirl motif with gunbelt, hat, boots and toy six shooters. That series of photos made me think of the skit on MST3K where Crow sings about how he’s the “crime bill BANG BANG!” and it gave me the giggles)[/sup]. We ended up with about four albums worth of nudes, which I packed in a box all by themselves and gave back to the MIL without comment. I’m somewhat grateful that her and my husband are estranged because I could never look her in the face again.
One of my friends inherited some really lovely vintage Victorian lingerie…from her Great Uncle. “The family always suspected something was a little odd.”
TheKid has been spending time with my Mom and has learned interesting things about her side of the family. I guess my great-grandfather on her side was a Chicagoland Jewish gangster who fled up here to avoid the cops. My grandmother never learned to read or write, as her father didn’t deem it necessary. For some reason, we still have heard nothing about a great-grandmother.
Mom’s stepmother came from the Ukraine at a fairly young age - 13ish or so. Not much was said about it, but we discovered she came over as a married woman, dumped her much older husband when they landed in New York, and became a seamstress/model. This was told to me by a family friend who lived in Alaska. She and my grandma were best friends in NYC during the Roaring 20’s, but the friend and her “connected” husband had to move far away in the late 30’s due to legal issues.
Join the club. Both my parents were O, and I’m A. My dad was also in prison during the time that I would have been conceived. My dad doesn’t care, cause to him I’m his regardless: my mom insisted that he was my bio dad. And I’ll never find out, short of putting an ad in the paper asking if anyone slept with my mom in mid-late 1963 or calling Maury Povich.
A friend of mine found out after his father died that the man was a full-blooded Cherokee. His family had Americanized their name to avoid discrimination and passed for white.
This is a mystery that developed before my mother died…
She had serious health problems the last few years of her life, and we finally got a top internist and geriatric specialist to become her doctor. After a ton of testing, he came up with a rather stunning diagnosis – third stage syphilis.
Both mom and dad denied any possibility of her having it. Since she might have acqired it decades ago, all of us kids had to be tested – we all tested negative. Don’t know if dad got tested or not. Frankly, I doubt it – he kept away from docs his whole life. Nevertheless, she was treated for it and several of her many symptoms went away. We (the children) believed the doctor.
So, we have no idea how she got it. She could have had an affair. She could have been raped and too ashamed to report it. My dad could have got it from someone else and passed it on to her. If he ever got treated for it himself, he never said anything to her about it.
I found out a couple of years back that my grandfather was not biologically my grandfather. Apparently grandma and grandpa had more marital issues than I’d been aware of and her children were all half-siblings.
I was totally comfortable finding out that I’m not biologically related to grandpa, he was a cretin and I only saw him a handful of times in my life.
I am, however, kind of sad that the only thing I’ll ever know about my real grandfather is that he was a jazz musician on the east coast some 56 years back. Sometimes I like to pretend he was Louis Armstrong (this is very unlikely given that my dad was a blonde haired, blue eyed baby), though he was probably just some starving artist with a weakness for gorgeous redheads.
Not shocking nowadays, but rather scandalous for the 1940’s. My dad out that his stepfather had been married previously and was divorced. He was a sailor and the papers spelled out the ex wifes name, the man she had been having an affair with, and the whole deal. The really interesting part was that he was divorced long after starting to date my Grandmother. (They dated about 8 years before marriage, although for about the first five they only saw each other when he was in port in the summer. Later he started taking winter jobs in the same town as Grandma.) It seems that my Grandfather’s ex wife was having an affair with another man for about 10 years before my Grandfather got around to divorcing her, or did he not know about it since he was on the boats all summer?
The odd thing was how my grandparents both ran down anyone who was divorced and only discussed it in shocked whispers. Also that it really rocked Dad, he was offended that he had never been told. Finding all of this out 7 years ago bothered him for a long time.
My grandfather, who was a German Jew, escaped Germany early, but went back to try and get his parents out in 1941. For reasons unfathomable, they refused to leave, and he only got out because of his medical degree and a few bluffs. He claimed he had no idea what happened to them after that.
When he died, my mother found a letter from one of his old neighbors, who had written him (in considerable grief) to say that his parents had been put on a particular train on a particular date. This train was well documented: on the way to the camps, it derailed. Rather than deal with the prisoners, the guards torched the train, and everyone on board was burned alive.
As far as I know, grandpa never told that to anyone.
Out curiosity how do it come to the point that it was necessary to perform those tests when you were an adult? Most of the time it’s child paternity and CS disputes that prompt these tests.
