Family Secrets

Dunno, they're secrets.

 

Until age 48 I thought I was born in Hawaii. I found out
from a cousin that I was really born in Kenya.

 

I have no idea who my biological grandfather is on my dad's side. To the best of my knowledge, he ran out on my grandmom either while she was pregnant with my dad, or not long after he was born. She then hooked up with my "real" grandfather, who was a wonderful man, and they were married for about 50 years and had four more kids.
My dad -- as well as my sisters and I, obviously -- have the deadbeat's last name. My four aunts had my grandfather's last name.

 

Interesting stories.

All four of my grandparents were born in Italy. When my paternal grandfather was a teenager (around 1919-20), the story goes that he was somehow involved in a situation where a man was thrown down a cliff. Soon after, he and his two brothers emigrated to America. One, Luigi, had TB, stayed at Ellis Island for three weeks and then was returned to Italy.

Anyway, my grandfather and the other brother, Luciano, opened a candy story on Mulberry Street in Brooklyn (at the time it was Little Italy, but now it's been swallowed up by Chinatown). At that time, store owners had to pay a "protection fee" to the mafia, i.e. if you don't give them money, bad things might happen. My grandfather had a short temper and when a mobster came to collect, my grandfather punched him out. The next day, the mafia came to the store looking for him and saw Luciano behind the counter. Thinking they had the wrong store, they left. My grandfather got the hint and stayed for a few weeks in Connecticut with people he knew from his hometown in Italy who had emigrated here. There, he met his future wife (my grandmother), and here we still are in Connecticut, 91 years after all this happened.

 

Mulberry St and Chinatown are in lower Manhattan. Maybe your grandfather started telling everyone that the store was in Brooklyn to throw them of the path.

 

Not really secrets because people know, but something my dad has NEVER mentioned to me and I'm nearly 41: both of my grandparents (his folks) were illegitimate. While now it's not that big of a deal, 90 years ago it was quite scandalous.

Doesn't bother me. If my 2 great grannies had 't been willing to get busy, I wouldn't be here today. For my dad though, it's obviously not something to be discussed in the light of day.

 

Hmmm. My mother used to get all emotional about the mathematics involved between the date of her parents' marriage (mid-February) and her birthday (mid-December).

A couple times she got all weepy about whether she was a "bastard" or not.

Her parents had married pretty late -- her father, who died before I was born, was 40, while her mother (who lived to be 99) was 34, so Mom went off on this tangent about whether they got married because they "had to."

During one of these discussions/arguments, I said, "who cares, they stayed married till the day he died, they had two more kids after you, Nana never remarried and has kept his name all this time, whether they got married because they 'had to,' obviously it was a good marriage, so what difference does it make?"

Anyway at the time Nana was still alive (in fact, she outlived my mom by a couple years) so I said, "if it really bugs you all that much, ask her. She's still got all her wits, if she thinks there's something you should know she'll tell you."

But as far as I know she never did.

Looking at this thread, I have to laugh. If that's the most scandalous thing in the family tree I guess I have a pretty dull family.

Although doing family-tree research over the past few years, a couple things:

1) From looking at marriage-dates and first-child birthdates, it certainly does appear as if a few other of my ancestor couples did get married "with great urgency," let's say. Personally I couldn't care less.

2) Nobody ever told me about Giles Corey until I dug it up a year or so ago.

 

We were on our way to my paternal grandparents' 50th-anniversary celebration when we suddenly did the math and discovered that my dad was born six months after the wedding. We didn't mention that to Dad, and he has never brought it up himself.

Edit: After reading Shoeless Joe's post, and then Starman's, I have to agree. Those grandparents of mine had the best marriage in town.

 

I have an uncle, who, in the late '60s, early '70s, married a black woman, which was considered really taboo back then. She had a couple of kids from a previous marriage as well, which complicated matters.

My mother, along with my father, and my aunt attended the wedding. My other uncle and my grandmother refused to attend, and wouldn't speak to him for a few years. My uncle and the black woman divorced a couple of years after I was born, and I have no memory of her.

Apparently at one point, my mom and grandmother got into an argument over the whole thing and my grandmother said she didn't want her to stay overnight in her apartment if she came to visit anymore. My parents ended up renting an apartment a few blocks away, as a weekend place, until they bought their house.

When my mom relayed it to me as a teen, I was shocked, and she warned me not to say anything about it because my grandmother was ashamed of her bigotry back then and it would have hurt her feelings.

 

Similar for me. It's never been mentioned, but my parents were in college and went to the courthouse to get married eight months before I was born. They had three other kids and are still married 32 years later, though my dad and my maternal grandparents didn't have much to do with each other for the first 10 years or so of my life. Everyone seemed to suddenly put it behind them one day and they get along great now.

I've heard rumors that my great uncle and his wife were swingers.

One that's actually a secret is my wife's grandfather's experience in WWII. He won't discuss it with anyone. All anyone really knows is that he spent some time in France and has some resentment because he wanted to be a pilot, but couldn't for some reason. My wife's uncle thinks part of it might be that his parents came from Italy and he may have fought against some relatives.

 

My uncle is manic depressant. He has spells just about every year, at the same time every year. The man used to be a school teacher, and several of the kids who were involved in the Carrollton bus crash were in some of his classes.

He used to tell me he has dreams where it feels like he's on the bus with him, that he can feel the flames around and on him, and that he can hear the kids and other people on the bus screaming for their lives. He swears up and down that he's on the bus with those kids, even though he knows he wasn't. He says he sees the faces of those kids in his dreams. They're even more prevalent, he told me once, around the anniversary of the wreck each year.

There's a memorial garden dedicated to those who perished in that wreck not far from where we live. It's just down the street from one of the schools we cover in the county. But my uncle will not go there. And that's probably a good thing, because there's no telling what might happen.

And before he got fired and had his teaching license suspended -- for inappropriate contact with a student is the story I've always been told -- he was also a football coach. A dang good one at that, I'm told. Whenever I see someone my uncle used to coach with, they always ask me about him. The answer's always the same, and they shake their heads and say he could've been the next great coach in Kentucky because he was so smart.

Hearing stories from those people -- one of whom was the assistant principal when I was in high school and would rib me all the time because of who my uncle is -- really makes me wish I could've gotten to know my uncle as that man instead of the one I know today.

 

my family on my dad's side has some money. It evidently comes from a great uncle who invested early in a successful company. Here's where it gets all soap opera-y. Evidently great uncle's daughter got engaged to a guy he didn't like and suspected was only after her for the money so he threatened to cut her out of the will. Turns out the guy was only into it for the money and promptly killed himself. This caused great uncle to suspect that his daughter couldn't make financial choices for herself and set up a trust that will take care of her but never make her wealthy. So when she goes, all that's left (which is still quite a bit) gets divided among all of us. She's still around. I've never met her, but my uncle has. Some day I'll get a call from a banker telling me she's gone and I'm $250k richer.
My parents didn't tell me any of this until I was 25, which I guess makes sense. Not knowing about the money let me grow up to not be a jerk who lorded the wealth over everyone.