Though he did several stints for a total of about 18 years in the slammer for one murder and various other offenses, my brother got away with about 99% of his crimes, including several other murders. (He called them ‘throw-away partners.’)
One of my great grandfathers apparently had a family with his aunt.
I turned out to be a mutant superhero.
My great grandfather shot and killed my great grandmother. My grandmother witnessed the shooting. It was supposedly a gun-cleaning accident, but my mother always said it was rumored her grandfather had a fancy woman in another city.
My great grandfather allegedly killed my great grandmother. He was one of the few men from our town to die by the electric chair. Every few years, our local newspaper does an article about murder.
http://malefactorsregister.com/wp/?p=1813
Sorry if this site brings you to a search page, it should be the first website. ‘Another One Beats The Chair’ is the name of the article, for those who are interested.
My sister-in-law married a closet sociopath who came out of the closet after the wedding. After a few wife- and child-beatings, and burning of clothes of wife & child so they couldn’t leave the house, my wife called his master sergeant and asked if this is acceptable behavior of a member of the US Army. Turns out, not so much, so he was confined to base. My wife then wired her sister some money so she could take a bus from Texas back home to Wisconsin, where she & her daughter moved in with her parents. Crazy husband then went AWOL, got a ride to Wisconson, stopped by a sibling’s house and abused their kid while he was there, then showed up on his in-law’s doorstep looking for his wife.
Why my father-in-law didn’t blow his damn head off I’m not sure, particularly since this was the guy that ran him over with a tractor a couple years earlier, then got his 15-year-old daughter pregnant but that’s a different story. Anyway, they took him in for a while, but then the police showed up, arrested his sorry ass, and he was tried, convicted and did his time for child molestation.
After he was released, he started the divorce process with his wife but she kept refusing to sign the papers, mostly because he had gotten her pregnant again somewhere along in there, and the general consensus of my in-laws was that this kid was going to need a daddy, so the divorce was off.
:dubious:
This would be why, when we moved three times in two years, we didn’t tell my wife’s side of the family about it. Took them years to find us.
My father was in the Navy during WW2. One day while in uniform and on active duty he was walking along and accidentally (or knowing Dad, “accidentally”) didn’t salute an officer who happened by. Next thing he knew he was backed up against a wall with two other higher-ups in his face. Dad had just dissed Admiral Nimitz, and was threatened with a death worse than fate before they finally let him go.
Dad knew he’d been lucky to escape with nothing worse than a severe verbal thrashing.
Yeah, it’s more of a bone splinter than a skeleton, but I felt like playing too.
Was that you?
Anyway, according to my late grandfather when he fought in Italy during WWII, they only captured prisoners of war when there were too many to easily shoot. Other than that, if they were advancing or retreating and someone popped up with a white flag or his hands raised, he didn’t get a chance to surrender.
War is hell.
On my mother’s side:
My great-aunt (grandmother’s sister) was a prostitute who danced in very early Las Vegas and eventually married her “manager” (pimp). When they went back home to Washington, my grandfather -who was awesome- insisted they be considered part of the family and I had no idea that they had any history like that until my late 30s.
My great-great grandfather disappeared during a big flood somewhere. He might have died but the family strongly hinted they think he took the opportunity to take off.
Also- my great-grandfather was a McCoy, of the Hatfields and McCoys though I don’t know the details.
On my dad’s side:
My great-great grandfather was involved in a tractor company that is fairly well-known now. Somehow, he lost his partnership, the details are not clear. He became increasingly crazy over it and my great-great grandmother left him and took her kids off to Texas. They were literally picking cotton in the fields at her relative’s farm when great great grandad showed up and shot and killed her in front of her kids. Amazingly- he did not get the death penalty and survived in prison long enough to be released when my great-grandmother was still young enough to have small children. She in turn was so worried her father would come after her - since she had testified against him- that she eventually was committed to a sanitarium. I don’t know what happened to her after that, They had five children at the time and my grandfather and his older siblings were allowed to stay with their father while the two youngest were adopted out after social workers in California basically pressured him in to it saying he could not take care of all of them. They were not reunited until all were adults. Very sad story- my grandfather never got over losing his mother and almost half his family that way.
My grandfather (the same one that never got over it) was a very bad alcoholic and it wasn’t until he because diabetic and almost died that he gave that up. He once made my teenager aunt hold a gun to his head. My grandmother spent a lot of time living with us right before the big rush to the hospital when he almost died. However, once he stopped drinking, he was a kind and gentle person to be around though he did still have an addiction problem - the second time around it was gambling - and when he died my grandmother had some pretty nasty financial surprises.
I think that’s it… that I know of.
Apparently, I had a great uncle in the mafia in Holland on my father’s side and I had an uncle that was a founding member of a now-defunct motorcycle gang. An uncle by marriage was heavily involved in the cocaine trade with bikers, he did some time and is now reformed, from what I hear.
An great aunt was a sad schizophrenic that hung herself in her attic - it was really tragic because she had been trying to get help to no avail. She cleaned her house from top to bottom, made sure her kids were taken care of, and hung herself.
My family who I got my last name from owned slaves for 250 years up until the Civil War (1615 - 1865). The history of NOT owning slaves is much more recent than that. What comes around, goes around however. My Great-great-great grandfather pissed his slave off so much that he got hacked to pieces over it. The slave was executed for the crime.
One of my other great-grandfathers on a slightly different side was widely known as one of the worst people you could ever imagine although he was an incredible businessman. He and his brother killed three people in separate fights before they were even 18 years old. The were never prosecuted because they juveniles and made the plea that it was self-defense, Rumors exist to this day that it never stopped there. There is a name for the place where I grew up in a river bend called [My Family] Hole where people went in but they never came back out again. They disappeared many people that crossed them and none were ever found again
.
I was very close to my grandmother and that was her father. She only told me a few things about him when she was very old and all of it was horrible. I am fairly certain that he also sexually molested her based on some indirect things she told me and I am completely certain that he brutalized my great-grandmother both sexually and physically because I was close to her to and simple references said it all.
I have a huge set of black relatives thanks to another great-grandfather. He sired a son with a maid in Thomas Jefferson style before he married my great-grandmother. She always knew about it but I never did until I was an adult. The really weird thing was that we lived in a really small town and everyone knew each other. Some of my black classmates are my direct cousins even though we never knew it growing up.
My great grandfather on my mothers side had to leave Germany because of some crimes we arent too sure about. My mother said my fathers father did some bad things in his youth although she wont give details.
One of my aunts claimed to be molested by one of my uncles.
They’re separated by a generation.
I hear this from a distance, after quite a few years of wondering why nobody on one side of the family is talking to another.
Once I heard that, it explained quite a lot actually, not just for my immediate and extended family but for society at large lately.
-Oh well. so you’re not as special and unique as you’d thought.
My great-great-great uncle Isaac_C._Haight ordered and participated in the slaughter of 120 innocent men, women and children in what became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
My great grandfather married a southern plantation owner’s daughter, and then fell for a pretty house slave who was his wife’s half sister. Right before the war, when his wife threatened to report his northern sympathies, he ran off with the slave. They made it to what is now Montana, where they built a stage stop and had 19 children.
My mother’s uncle spent his wedding night in jail for numbers running. It seemed the newly elected mayor was having a crackdown on gambling.
My father’s parents were new immigrants when they got married. After Zayda died, my dad and aunt were going through their parents’ papers and discovered that although they had a PA marriage license, they had gotten married in NJ. Which led Dad to look at Aunt Mildred and say, “I guess you know what that makes us?” 
My grandmother’s family was very large, and, while they migrated all over the place, stayed very close, so we have a LOT of family drama, some of which can rise to the level of skeletons.
At a reunion in the '80s I met an elderly cousin, whose husband was permanently institutionalized in the '20s. In those days you could not divorce a person due to mental illness, so she openly lived out of wedlock with someone for the rest of her days. This cut her off from the rest of the family until quite late in life, when no one really gave a damn any more. A very nice and interesting person; I am glad I made her acquaintance, even if for a brief time.
I’m glad that you interpret that in the way it was meant. The man was well intentioned but deeply racist and misogynist. And so much of his ministerial work was apparrently to stroke his own ego.
Total guess, but I suspect convict ancestors stopped being a “thing” about the time that Italian/Greek migration became significant enough to give the pearl-clutchers something else to have the vapours over. So … fifties or before.
Yeah, I had one of those, too. It seriously was quite the scandal. It was way before my time, but I believe she had to move away from their small town and make up stories (father is dead, father is on a ship somewhere, virgin birth).
My cousin* murdered my aunt (his mom) then hanged himself. We don’t think he intended it, more like a drunken confrontation with a frail, old woman that turned a bit south (not like that’s much better).
My grandfather made moonshine during prohibition, had illegal coal mines, and was the neighborhood doctor even though he had no medical training (although apparently he was quite good at it).
*There are a lot of adopted people in my family and we never distinguish this fact, except when we tell this story.“My adopted cousin murdered…”
Family legend has it that some ancestors were antebellum slave owners in N. Carolina, and that when this guy mustered out of the Confederate army, he moved to Texas, and apparently a good number of his former slaves came with him.
I don’t know if that last part is feel-good BS from 75 years ago, or if it’s the real thing though; it’s what my 89 year old grandmother says though.
On the other side of the family, my great-grandfather was apparently a torch-carrying member of the Illiinois Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and 1930s.
That’s about all I know about.
Not exactly fair to ask w/o sharing. What skeletons are in Your family closet?