When I was about 16 I found out that my mother used to be a nun. I asked her about it and she said, “Well, it wasn’t any of your business.”
My father is a con artist. He opens credit card accounts using my name and my brother’s. (Identity theft by parent. Its tough to clean up.) He also opened a checking account in my brother’s name and bounced checks all over town. Father was also married four times and I just found out that Wife #3 is taking him to court for fraud. I haven’t spoken to him in ten years.
My great-grandmother was divorced three times. This was unspeakable at the time (late 1930’s, early 1940’s). Looking at the chronology of births. It looks like one of my great-aunts was born between husbands. :eek:
My paternal grandfather, Pop, was the head electrician of Louisiana State Penitentiary. I knew he was in charge of checking the electric chair before an execution. There are rumors that he helped moved a body. Pop was friends with the warden. The warden liked to visit a house whose occupants that had a reputation of being very “friendly”. One night, the warden had too much fun. Someone called Pop; he took the warden to his home. (I have no idea how true this is. My grandfather was not a popular guy. The yarn that Pop helped hide that the warden died in bed with two please forgive me “High Yeller” girls may have been spun out of spite.)
Also on my father’s side of the family was a badger game. My aunt (Father’s younger sister) got involved with one of her high school teachers. The teacher was a member of a promeninent family. They paid my grandparents not to report their son to the authorities. I suspect Pop and Nana set this guy up.
On my father’s side of the family, most members work for the Penal system. They may be on the wrong side.
I found out recently that, like me, my father hates water and only drinks it plain in the direst (or driest, heh) circumstances.
I tried asking Mom about how Pop proposed and Grandma told me that what I was asking was very personal. :rolleyes:
Anyhoo, as a young adult I was treated to the information that my father had reflected on killing my mom, to her face, after she was acting “too religious”.
My maternal grandmother was married previously to an abusive drunk, and had one son with him, and was pregnant with a second, before she gathered up the nerve to divorce him and marry my grandfather. This would have been in the early 1930s, when such a thing was nearly unheard of. I didn’t know that the white-trash element of our family, Uncle Jack, was her son until after she had died. He had apparently picked up the abusive drunk gene, and was mainly persona non grata in the family for my whole life. As it turns out, my grandfather adopted the other son, who was born before they were married, and gave him the family name, but would have no part of the other one. So my Uncle Don was techically illegitimate when he was born.
I also discovered that the man who spawned me was giving my mother the bare minimum of money to feed us and run the house on, while he was squirrelling money away in a secret bank account. When my mother finally left him, he had enough cash to buy a house and a plane. The rest, he drank away.
I found out just before I got married that my dad is 1/16 Cherokee.
I found out last week from my uncle (mom’s brother) that one of my ancestors who emigrated from Sweden was born out of wedlock.
The DAR had a booth at an event held by my employer a couple of years ago. My uncle (dad’s brother) had told me that we’re somehow related to Benedict Arnold (he hasn’t told me how, exactly- I should ask sometime). Just to mess with her, I told the lady who was manning the DAR booth about this (nobody else was coming up to the booth). She was trying to get me to join! Absolutely-no-class, related-to-a-famous-traitor me! :eek: 
I thought that was hilarious…
My grandparents were both born in 1911. They were married in 1926, had their first kid in 1932, kid #2 came along in 1934. They were Catholic and were married for 76 years prior to my Grandfathers death.
We knew this, all of us grandchildren. But we never put two-and-two together until Christmas when we realized…
- Our grandparents were 15 when they were married!
- Not only that, but they had to elope to Ohio because (and this was verified later), W. VA. marriage laws were too strict. Go figure that one out.
- We also reasoned that, though Catholic, the lack of children meant a certain…* Protestant-like*… attitude towards whatever foolishness (my grandmothers favorite word) the Pope had to say.
3a. Or they started doing it in 1931, five years after marriage, and stopped in 1933. I doubt that, however.
All stereotypes aside, West Virginia’s marriage laws are stricter than some other states’. For example, first cousins can’t get married in West Virginia, though they can in some other states like California. Minimum age laws have gotten more uniform recently, though they used to differ quite a bit by state- that’s probably what was going on here.
One set of my great-grandparents were shop owners who got busted by the communists. It wasn’t that they were businesspeople, but that they’d bought protection from the Japanese during the war. After the Japanese got kicked out the new government decided anyone who’d bought the protection was a collaborator and confiscated their home and business, forcing them to return to the country. Unfortunately, they’d sold all their land in the country when they moved to the city so they spent the rest of their days living in a barn which their seven children. I only learned this about a month ago but it explains a hell of a lot about my grandmother.
I’m related, on my paternal grandmother’s side, to three famous men all with the same last name. One was a G-man, one lived in the White House, and one was a vaccuum cleaner salesman.
I’ve known for a long time that when my parents married, dad as 22 and mom was 17. What I just found out was that when they started dating, he was 19 and she was 14. :eek:
This December they celebrate 50 years of wedded bliss.
MayoDad and I were at Walmart in 2000 (I was 13) when Dad suddenly made us duck into an aisle. The conversation we had is as follows:
Me: What are you doing?
Dad: I saw Sarah, and I don’t really want to talk to her.
Me: Sarah who?
Dad: My ex-wife.
Me: (incredulously) YOU HAVE AN EX-WIFE?!?!
Dad: (perplexed) Yeah. You know that.
Me: I do not!
Mom and Dad never meant to hide that Dad had an ex-wife, they’d just assumed that my sister and I knew. That was pretty surreal.
My paternal grandmother was into genealogy pretty heavily, and I learned some awfully interesting things. My favorites by far is that I’ve had a direct ancestor fight in every major war that took place in America from Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 through WWII and that my great-grandfather Mayo was literally found on the front porch of my great-great-great-grandparents with a note that asked them to adopt, and they did.
Correction: the underlined part should read great-great-grandfather.
I knew my grandmother’s name was Ida. I did not know her middle name until I saw it on her tombstone: Ida Clair. My mother swears it’s her real full name.
I thought my other grandmother’s name was Shirley. I found out when she died that it was Sarah and she’d taken Shirley in order to be more American like Shirley Temple.
Where did that take place, FlyingRamenMonster? My world history knowledge isn’t complete enough to pinpoint it, and it does sound like an interesting story.
I’m guessing China.
What’d I win?
I was in my mid 30’s and my dad and I were visiting a friend of his. This friend had a target shooting range, with targets ranging from bull’s eye targets, silhouettes, and bowling pins suspended from ropes, along with skeet. He had a wide range of weaponry to choose from, ranging from pistols to rifles to shotguns.
He offered my dad the opportunity to shoot.
Dad had been in the Navy, but I’d never seen him shoot nor express interest in firearms. yet he picked up a rifle, and essentially plunked out a bunch of bull’s eyes in everything he shot at, blew apart the bowling pins, and knocked the skeet out of the sky 14 times out of 15, He was equally adept with every weapon. I was stunned, but his friend the firearms aficionado, was just amazed by Dad’s accuracy.
When queried about his skills, Dad said he’d been pretty good in the service, but had turned down invitations to try out for sniper school or some such, as he preferred the hard-hat diving and driving construction equipment. To him, shooting with great accuracy was easy, but not particularly fun.
Hoover?
Hoover.
My father left my mother soon after they got married. He only came back when my mother found out she was pregnant. Surprise, they divorced 6 years later.
This one wasn’t directly about me but it was family and it was a shocker. I was visiting my father 2 years ago. I have two very much younger stepsisters who were still in high school. My stepmother asked me to get some viruses off of her computer while I was there. She gave me the administrator password. The whole household uses the same computer but they all had tightly controlled accounts. My stepsister Eve who was a senior in high school came over and started talking. I took a break and left her with the computer. When I came back she said, “I need to show you something”. She had been going through her mother’s e-mail and found some type of e-mail with the vital statistics of each child. Her father was not listed as her father. She later grilled her mother and found out that her supposed father thought he was infertile when they got married and so they used a sperm donor. You would think it would be tramatizing but it really wasn’t. Her father died when she was 8 and she never could stand him anyway. He wasn’t truly infertile however because her younger sister was his. I thought it was a little odd that they never figured it out on their own because Eve is a blonde haired, blue-eyed athlete and her younger sister looks roughly middle-eastern.
A couple of Christmas’s ago, I visited my dad and his (now) wife in California.
My dads side of the family is a bit nutty and it amuses us to no end to talk about my crazy Grampa Jerry who quit his job at the nuclear plant to buy a piece of a mountain so that he could build a bomb shelter for when “the big one hit”. His ingenious plan was to build under the mountain. My dad asked him how he intended to, you know, breathe and he explained that he would run a tube out for oxygen. 
Nevertheless, he lived next to this mountain for nearly 20 years and never got around to finishing his beloved bomb retreat.
Instead, he lived in a cellophane house right next to the mountain. Yes, cellophane. In Arizona. My dad would never take me out to visit because Grampa was crazy and all of his water was kept in bins he stole from the Nuclear Plant (heh) during his tenure there.
Oh, the laughs we have about crazy Grampa Jerry.
So on this particular Christmas I remarked that I was glad I didn’t catch the Crazy Gene™ from Grampa Jerry and dad’s lovely young bride replied, “Well, of course not. You’re not eve–” Dad cut her off mid-sentence. Hrm.
After a bit of “WTF YOU HAVE TO TELL ME!” Dad confided that Grampa Jerry was my cousin’s grampa, but not mine. Hmm.
I knew he and my dear grandmother had a pretty rocky relationship (they were split up before I was born), but I didn’t realize that her sons had been fathered by different men. :eek: :eek:
In fairness, my dad only found out a few years ago… I can’t really fault him for never telling me. It turns out that his real father was a musician on the East Coast somewhere.
I tease him every once in awhile and say things like, “Maybe it was BB King!”