Do you know of any "Family Secrets" ???????

fuzzybuddy

fuzzybuddy

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Location
The Sticks, Northeast PA.
My grandparents were married forever. When my grandmother passed away, there was a problem getting her birth certificate. Her birth would have been in the late 1800s and maybe in another nation. On the last day of her Wake, the birth certificate was found. They had to inform my grandfather that his blushing bride of 17, was really a 25 year old woman. (She had 7 kids after marriage.) He didn't know that, OR what happened in those missing 8 years.
I always thought my grandmother was the only halfway sane one in the family, But she had a secret 8 year gap in her life.
Any family secrets????????
 

fuzzybuddy said:
My grandparents were married forever. When my grandmother passed away, there was a problem getting her birth certificate. Her birth would have been in the late 1800s and maybe in another nation. On the last day of her Wake, the birth certificate was found. They had to inform my grandfather that his blushing bride of 17, was really a 25 year old woman. (She had 7 kids after marriage.) He didn't know that, OR what happened in those missing 8 years.
I always thought my grandmother was the only halfway sane one in the family, But she had a secret 8 year gap in her life.
Any family secrets????????
Click to expand...
So many secrets in our family. I don't have the energy to write about and it would be hugely long...
 
fuzzybuddy said:
My grandparents were married forever. When my grandmother passed away, there was a problem getting her birth certificate. Her birth would have been in the late 1800s and maybe in another nation. On the last day of her Wake, the birth certificate was found. They had to inform my grandfather that his blushing bride of 17, was really a 25 year old woman. (She had 7 kids after marriage.) He didn't know that, OR what happened in those missing 8 years.
I always thought my grandmother was the only halfway sane one in the family, But she had a secret 8 year gap in her life.
Any family secrets????????
Click to expand...
are you going to start looking for those missing years?
 

All families have secrets.

Over the years I’ve leaned many of my family secrets and felt bad that some of them would be considered trivial today.

Still a couple of shocking ones that would get someone a long prison sentence.

The oldest was an immigrant ancestor that fought in the American Revolutionary War.

He was awarded a land grant for his service and raised a large prosperous family acquiring more land as the years went by.

When his wife died he took his youngest daughter as his wife and she eventually inherited the bulk of his fortune.

This would be totally unacceptable today but I’ve heard that it happened more often than people today would believe.
 
Aunt Bea said:
When his wife died he took his youngest daughter as his wife and she eventually inherited the bulk of his fortune.

This would be totally unacceptable today but I’ve heard that it happened more often than people today would bebelieve.
Click to expand...
Quite common for the oldest daughter to become the wife and mother after her mother was gone. It was essential to replace the wife and mother asap and who better than with one already in the household. Sad, but true.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
Any family secrets????????
Click to expand...
Just in the last couple years found out my grandfather lied to us... Knew he served in the Pacific during WWII, said he was an aerial recon photographer. After My Dad passed my stepmom informed us that he was taken prisoner in the Philippines at the beginning of the war, survived the Bataan death march, and was rescued from a POW camp in Japan after the war.

EDIT I was watching a documentary on the Bataan march and this picture came up that left me cold. I ordered the show and everyone that knew him agree it could very well be my grandfather, taken in a Japan POW camp.
 

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A male British cousin of mine married an American woman in San Antonio about 24 years ago, where her family lives. The pair of them have now lived in the UK together for the past 23 years or so. My cousin's parents have now passed away - they never knew their son and his 'fiance' were married. I managed to get a copy of the marriage cert when I was doing my family tree, but someone in the U.S. had to help me to obtain it.

This cousin of mine doesn't know that I know he's married. His sister knows he's married, she managed to figure it out for herself -- let's call it her woman intuition. He doesn't know his sister knows either. So there are only two people on this side of the Atlantic who know. The saddest thing in my eyes is that his parents never knew.
 
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I had a number of family discussions with my Aunt Becky, while visiting with my Uncle Carl(mom's brother) and his wife Becky. She told me some things(by all means not the whole story) about my grandfather whom I had never met, and nobody ever talked about. I hadn't even seen a picture of my g'dad, until that visit. Long story, turns out my twin uncles had decided to kill their father behind the barn. They didn't, but he and my grandmother split up, she came to live with us when I was 5. Grandaddy built a cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains and lived there by himself, until he died, in 1964.
 
The secrets that were found out in my family were:

Paternal grandmother subtracted 10 years off her age when she married my grandfather (this secret didn't come out until long after she passed away, my mom figured it out when she was doing genealogy research and had a heck of a time tracking down her birth certificate).

My maternal great-grandmother got pregnant at 16 from a visiting French guy, and that was why she had to marry my creepy widowed great-grandfather who already had a large quantity of children (this secret was uncovered during my mom's genealogy research too).

My maternal aunt's first child was born out-of-wedlock -- this turned out to only be a secret from me, which was super annoying since I embarrassed myself defending her to other relatives, so everyone else felt more informed and I felt like an idiot.

My sister was secretly married to her boyfriend the year before her big wedding, which I could have figured out if I hadn't assumed my sister was clueless when she slipped up and mentioned they filed a joint tax return -- at that time I told her she was wrong to do that because you can't file joint just by living with someone -- she told me after her wedding that she was so relieved I hadn't realized the truth.

I wonder how many secrets there were that I don't know about.
 
lots I’d need to employ a secretary if I was about to post it

I’d say a fair few of us grew up where we didn’t speak unless we were spoken to ,let alone be in on a conversation who was having affairs with the butcher the baker or the candlestick maker.

Now days with DNA testing being cheap and ready available wonder how many are discovering they are not their fathers child / not related at all .

I will say and I’ve posted on here about it before What happened to Vicky’s baby ?? ( she was impregnated at 13 by her father ) my stepfather ….she took the child home and while she was out the child vanished ( she was a month old )
Vicky Died 20 years ago at 49 her dying wish was to find the child ..never did …it was a great mystery
secret ~ most of the other siblings ( now deceased ) denied it ever happened , but she had proof~ I seen / read hospital records of the child being born ……so it’s a family secret that went to the grave with her parents ( I was still living in NSW at the time it happened ) ….the family including V , were living in South Aust
 
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And then there was my father's mother's father.
The great grandfather long gone that no one in the family ever talked about ... and I asked.
Right now, I couldn't even tell you his name ... except his last name.
All I got was that he was close to seven feet tall.
That must have been somewhat of an oddity way back then.
He was said to be very abusive toward his family, ultimately deemed insane and committed.
Not the stuff of pleasant Sunday dinner conversation.
 
Magna-Carta said:
A male British cousin of mine married an American woman in San Antonio about 24 years ago, where her family lives. The pair of them have now lived in the UK together for the past 23 years or so. My cousin's parents have now passed away - they never knew their son and his 'fiance' were married. I managed to get a copy of the marriage cert when I was doing my family tree, but someone in the U.S. had to help me to obtain it.

This cousin of mine doesn't know that I know he's married. His sister knows he's married, she managed to figure it out for herself -- let's call it her woman intuition. He doesn't know his sister knows either. So there are only two people on this side of the Atlantic who know. The saddest thing in my eyes is that his parents never knew.
Click to expand...
What is the reason your cousin doesn't admit he's married?
 

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