Similar to FairyChatMom’s relative, my father’s oldest sister got pregnant sans husband in the early fifties, and almost certainly didn’t marry my oldest cousin’s father. (My aunt and uncle were married for more than fifty years, and had three younger children. The oldest cousin looks nothing like my uncle - the rest definitely bear a strong resemblance - and looks nothing like my father’s side if the family.) What makes this a great story, to me: My aunt was seeing an older, divorced man, and my Grandpa didn’t like that one bit. He somehow managed to get that divorced man locked up. Then my aunt turned out to be pregnant, so Grandpa had to bail the boyfriend out of jail for a wedding. Apparently the wrong boyfriend, though!
My great-grandmother had a child out of wedlock, too, in the late 19-teens in very rural south Georgia. As far as I know, she never named the father, but later married my great-grandfather, who raised Granny’s oldest daughter like one of his own. We may finally have some notion of whom the father might have been, thanks to some dredged-up family memories, but we’ll never know for sure.
Similarly, that grandmother’s mother was sort of a foundling. Her father had a job that involved traveling, and apparently had at least one girlfriend on the side. The girlfriend got pregnant and had a baby, and apparently raised her for a couple of years. Circumstances changed - maybe the girlfriend got sick, maybe she had a chance to marry advantageously? - but when she could no longer care for the child, she literally dropped the toddler off to play in her father’s yard with her half-siblings. I suspect that my great-great-great grandfather’s wife must have been a saint (and my grandmother confirms that she was a very nice lady,) because that woman raised her husband’s illegitimate child as though she were no different from the rest of the pack. (I did recently solve a tiny smidge of the mystery surrounding my great-great Grandmother. In the 1870 census, her last name is listed as Collins, although by the 1880 census she was listed as Mary McDonald - her father’s surname. Maybe one day I’ll be able to figure out whom her mother might have been.)
My maternal grandfather’s mother had a sister who ran a boarding house in Savannah, Georgia in the twenties and thirties. Apparently, Aunt Sadie also had a husband with a temper, and a drinking problem. The official story is that Aunt Sadie was cooking dinner one midday when she heard a loud noise, and rushed out to the hallway to find her husband shot by an unknown assailant, who was never discovered. The unofficial story is that one of the sons probably killed him. (Random: a few years ago, my mother was talking to my grandmother about one of her colleagues who owned another small taxicab company in Savannah. Mom referred to him by his nickname, but then corrected herself to his given name - which is a little unusual. Grandmother immediately asked “That’s not one of our [John Does], is it?” Ma went back to work the following week, and asked the other cabbie what his grandmother’s name was. “Sadie.” Well, hello cuz!)
The biggest “scandal” I’ve uncovered personally was while doing genealogy research on my mother’s mother’s father’s side of the family. My great-grandfather died when my grandmother was only 2, and she had always assumed, based on his last name, that his family were connected to the Salzburgers who were colonial emigrants to Georgia. What I found, though, (aside from the fact that those folks apparently thought that all Boy Children should be named John/Johannes,) was that those Germans had made it to Georgia no earlier than the late seventeen-nineties, by way of New York. And the John G who was born in New York in 1795, moved south to Georgia no later than 1816. His marriage certificate is from that year, and his wife is listed on the certificate as “mulatto.” Grandmother has spent my entire life denigrating my father’s family as being low-class, and always voiced suspicion about there being “something in the woodpile, if you know what I mean.” I really, really enjoyed breaking that one to Grandmother! (The funniest bit was when she tried to explain to me that “mulatto” was often used to describe someone with a Native American parent… Um, no. Also, don’t you remember telling me about having a DNA test that confirms that you have no Native ancestry?) (Second random bit: There is definitely fairly recent African ancestry on my father’s side of the family, too - most likely due to a Seminole great-grandmother. But no one of that side of the family even acted like it was scandalous. Which is the only reason that I enjoyed tweaking my Grandmother’s nose about her own black grandmother.)
Finally: I’m descended on one side of the family from a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and on another side from someone who murdered a signer. (Lachlan MacIntosh killed Button Gwinnett in a duel.)