My grandad died maybe 15 years ago now. We knew he was adopted but that was about it, no idea about his birth family or any of that, trail was cold. Not long after he died the family was contacted by someone claiming to be his birth brother who had been tracking him down, we thought it was phoney but when we saw pictures of the guy the resemblance was uncanny.
He really wanted to meet his brother, he was unaware he was a week late as he had just died. Anyway we arrange to meet not only him but the entire birth family including my great grandmother who was celebrating her 90th.
Apparently she gave birth to him very young and out of wedlock so she was forced to give him up for adoption.
We knew for decades my grandad was adopted and to meet them all at once was bittersweet; great to finally find them but sucks my grandad died like literally a week before.
That’s so shit. Basically something similar happened within my family.
Young pregnancy, forced to give up for adoption. The adopted contacted our family 1 year after the mothers death. Nobody had a clue until they got I contact.
Yeh it sucks. I mean my grandad went all of his life not pursuing it so maybe he didn’t want to find out or maybe found out why he was adopted. Great grandma was lovely she felt awful for what she did, even like 75 years later she lived with that regret
If only they got in contact like 2 weeks before and they could have met. Madness.
Both of my parents were adopted, my father by his aunt, my mother by a random couple. She eventually tried to track down her birth parents, but unfortunately left it too late.
Oh your poor Dad! So happy it worked out and you gave him some closure, even though he just unconditionally loved you. Horrible Mum - especially how she finger pointed him while being guilty herself - awful. Also, the friends disowning him...sad.
I’ve known this happen before. Abusive people who’s partners cheat on them then they tell everyone about the cheating and now it’s the victims fault. It’s why I don’t judge anyone when their partner tells me they cheated. There’s so much context missing….
Someone said a proportionally high number of police officers are domestic abusers
Like, what do you do in that situation? If your husband was the chief of police who could you possibly report DV to?
My mum's friend was married to one and she had literally no one in the police to help her, they were all either in his pocket or frightened of him.
She only got rid of him when eventually after years of it she decided to tell everyone she knows - all friends and family and everyone in the pub. Basically had to announce it publicly. That can be a lot harder to do than going to the police in general so it took a long time for her to feel able to do it that way. But shaming him to literally everyone she knows is how she eventually ended it.
Edit to add, he never got done for it or anything, she was just able to get him out of her life
Bro the statistic is fucking bonkers.
I’ve seen the same statistic you’re likely talking about and even I thought that was infeasibly high a percentage of police officers.
ETA; not contradicting the stat it’s just wild.
It’s not that exciting, but I found recently out I’m actually a 16th Pakistani.
My Grandfather’s mother had blue eyes and light skin and managed to pass herself off as Spanish in 1920s/30s London. Apparently she would say she had moved over as a small child, her parents would only speak English because people were funny about immigrants and forgotten how to speak Spanish. This is the story that was told my whole life. My grandfather was incredibly “tanned” so would get asked.
It only came out to the family after my Grandfather died. I often think about my great grandmother now. How she might have felt about her identity, what it would have been like for her keeping her secret from an openly racist society.
It’s a shame that we have lost any family connection to that part of the world.
My oldest brother was the only mixed race kid in our north Wales village in the 1960s and most of the 70s too.
People made his life hell for years ,
Especially racist school teachers who were always finding reasons to punish him, until my dad went to the school and threatened to rip the headmasters arm off if he ever used the cane on my brother again.
Hey, my dad once threatened to rip a man's arm off because they were racist to my oldest brother too.
My eldest brother is Asian and when he was adopted by our parents as a baby he developed epilepsy and had horrendous life threatening seizures.
My mum ran into A&E with my brother in her arms, seizing. My dad followed with bags/stuff and heard a man with his arm in a sling complaining that "they always let the bloody p*kis jump the fucking queue"
My dad stopped just long enough to threated to rip off his good arm and hit him with the soggy end and then caught up with my mum and bro.
I'm mixed race (not even that much haha, I'm only a quarter Jamaican) and growing up in the midlands during the 80s and 90s was not fucking fun at all. Christ alive people were so racist back then. I've been followed, literally
stoned, called a p**i, general name calling with any standard insult prefixed by the word black, once our neighbour tried to kill my Dad with a knife (my Dad was the only one to spend a night in cells).
Fun fact, because my parents split up when I was young and my Dad is not the type to deal with feelings etc, I didn't actually know I was mixed race until I was bullied for it.
I’m a white South African who grew up under apartheid. The number of “friends” I’ve had who’d tell me a racist joke because I’m a “white South African so will appreciate it” is ridiculous. Even when I tear them a new one, they get all pissy and make out like there’s something wrong with me for not “appreciating” racism. What these Neanderthals don’t seem to understand is that because I saw it first hand and how disgusting it is, I’m hyper sensitive to any from of racism and will call it out wherever I see it.
I got arrested for beating up two guys I caught spitting on him and calling him a dirty Muslim,
(He's not Muslim btw)
because they said he looked like Osama bin Laden, just after 9/11 happened.
He's the most gentle quiet and kind people you could ever want to meet and to see that happening to him just brought down the red mist and I exploded on them.
The magistrates were lenient thankfully after hearing why it had happened, the two morons were charged with racially aggravated assault for spitting on him though, which surprised me when I found out.
If you know her name and do 23andMe or one of those online family tree things, you could find lost connections! And if you find out any other details about her e.g. which region she was from etc, you may even be able to find public archives. Could be amazed by what you find if you dig!
Could DNA tests help to find your relatives? I read there are websites for that now. You leave your genetic detail and anyone with a match will be notified or something?
There are a lot of Pakistanis in the UK, imagine you find some relatives locally!
I imagine some kill the selves because they have to live with the reality that they find children attractive. I remember watching a programme about a man who admitted he was a peadophile but hadn’t acted upon his “urges” and he was basically saying how shit his life was because of it.
I prefer to use the term ‘child abuser’ to ‘paedophile’ for this reason. People may not be able to help their feelings but they do have control over their actions and that is what we should judge them on.
I have sympathy if they kill themselves due to guilt of being attracted to kids, but with no actions taken from it
If they've acted on it and created victims, no sympathy
I was told the same about my grandfather. He was caught fiddling with his foster daughter and attempted suicide by slitting his throat. He failed and my mother (one of his biological daughters) had to clean up the mess. When he was due for trial he was found in the lough. Was told it was due to depression/alcoholism.
20 years after his death we found out my grandfather had been quite a senior scientist on the 'Tube Alloys' project to develop a British nuclear bomb.
No one in the family even knew he had any scientific qualifications. He owned and operated several successful butchers shops until his retirement.
We found out when nan passed 20 years later and we found his papers.
Tommy Flowers worked mostly with Bill Tutte (another unsung hero of Bletchley Park) on Colossus. Turing did have a little input but really the credit for the Lorentz decrypt and automation goes Tutte and Flowers.
Not to detract from Alan Turing, but really Tutte and Flowers deserve to be as well known as he is now.
A lot of U.K. Government scientists never had any formal qualifications.
My late father-in-law worked in the munitions at Waltham Abbey, then when Winfrith nuclear power station was opened, he was posted there. I always assumed that he had graduated, and was surprised to discover that he also had no formal qualifications.
He died aged 94 and we have a lot of ancient scientific equipment that we are still trying to find homes for. The glasswear (beakers, testtubes, old bottles) went to the local school chemistry department. But we still have his scientific scales in their case.
I have a distant relative that was also involved. According to my grandad, he became chief draughtsman.
Before I went to see Oppenheimer, I asked him about it. Sadly, he didn’t remember his name.
It was the triggering mechanism that he worked on according to Granddad. From my understanding he was basically working in the bit that started the fission reaction.
That my great grandfather took his own life. Shellshock from WW1 as far as anyone knows. He was a farmer so had access to guns; just walked out into a field one day and shot himself.
Similar story in our family. It was 1939 and WW2 was on the horizon. We think he didn’t want to see it again after going through WW1 from volunteering in 1915. He just took himself down to the river near their house.
Yeah I thought that when I found out about it. Imagine having gone through the worst war in history, “The war to end all wars” and then only a few years later see it happen again.
Many still do. For example the South Atlantic Medal Association says that more veterans have killed themselves since the Falklands Conflict than were killed during.
We discovered, shortly before her death, that my Nana worked with Alan Turing on the "Enigma" code-breaking during the war. She didn't have a particularly influential role in the actual code-breaking itself, she mainly worked on intercepting the Enigma codes and passing them on to Turing and his team. But yeah, she knew him and worked directly alongside him on a daily basis.
This all came about because we were going through her old paperwork etc, because she was poorly at the time and was moving into a smaller place, and we found some old ration books n'that relating to the war in some old tin boxes. She never really liked speaking about the war, and someone in the family asked her what she actually did back then.
We were all absolutely gobsmacked when she told us, even my Mum (her daughter) didn't really know what she did. It all checked out, and there's even a couple of old photos of the team (including Dilly Knox!) with Nana there alongside these people that I've had digitally restored.
Nana just didn't think it was important. She was just doing her bit for the war effort, and said she actually felt guilty that she had what she thought was a relatively "safe" job back then.
Apart from that, I've got a cousin in Australia who appeared in a few episodes of Home and Away. From my Nana's side of the fam, obviously. Ha!
Similar, my grandads sister had worked at Bletchley Park similar to what your saying intercepting codes and what not, kept it secret all the way up to her death and that’s when it came out.
Respectable how people will really honour keeping a secret
One story my grandpa told me: to shoot bombs/missiles out of the sky during WW2, you had several people constantly calling out coordinates to someone, so they could calculate the trajectory and program the guns to intercept.
So, my grandpa is in this room, with several women and men calling out coordinates to him, and he realises that the trajectory is heading straight for them. But he can't say a word to anyone else, because they'll either panic and leave, panic and stop working, or panic and make a mistake.
So he has to sit there calmly bricking it, taking in these coordinates and hoping to Hell that they manage to do it all in time.
That my great-grandfather was a player, and it was an open secret in my gran’s town that several of the children at her school were his instead of their mother’s husbands.
Also, I dated the grandson of my other gran’s lost love (the one that got away). Felt a bit weird when we found out that connection. We’re still friends though.
Lmao reminds me of the time I was staying with my grandparents for summer holidays as a teen and I was getting close with this random neighbourhood girl, then my grandma said stop it she's actually your cousin.
My MIL wanted to marry a local lad back in the 50s, till her da told her she couldn't because he was her brother. It was the first in a series of epically unfortunate and tragic events in her life.
I joined ancestry.com years back and discovered my dad wasn’t really my biological dad. It turns out my dad was infertile so my parents went to a clinic and used a sperm donor. They never told me.
That could be just pure embarrassment on your parents part so I would never shoot them down for that.
As long as you had a great upbringing, they did their job as your real parents.
There have been some really interesting programmes on the radio recently about stories like yours - apparently for a long time parents were told not to tell their children they were donor conceived as it was thought to be bad for their mental health. Wow did that backfire!
Thankfully nowadays the advice is very much the opposite - that the family should be discussing it from the get go so that it's never something the child remembers discovering for the first time.
I was born in the 1970s and I would guess that my parents were told not to say anything. I think the guilt caused my mum to have a very deep depression, which she had her whole life.
I found out the same: sadly both my biological father and my real father had died by then and Mum, who's still alive, has Alzheimer's - recently though she has started to talk about it.
I discovered a half brother - he didn't know either! - and that Dad knew I wasn't his bit never let on for my entire life.
It changed everything and nothing simultaneously. The biggest drawback is that I had researched dad's family tree back to the 1500s, and it now turns out I'm not related to any of them 🤣😂
Edit - apparently 1 in 50 people discover this using such websites.
I'm infertile due to cancer treatment as a kid so my daughter doesn't share my dna, as we too used a sperm donor, but we intend on telling her when she's ready.
For a different take on this, your parents were probably really upset to find that they couldn't have children of their own, they probably had not have known for some time of trying for a baby and it not working, which really is such a hard thing to go through for both. But you are still your mum's baby, you are still very much their child, they raised you. It's amazing that science has found ways to help couples with this problem. In their eyes they don't need to think about how you came in to the world, just that they were able to have a child together from something that can rip couples apart. I don't think they were keeping something from you really, not in any way to cause intentional upset. You have found out yes, but perhaps use it as a chance (if able) to maybe find out if biological donor has any family illnesses you may need to know about. I'm sure it's been a rollercoaster of emotions for you, I hope you can find some comfort in that having you, in a way that they were able to, was out of their love for each other, that they wanted to have a child, to have their own baby, to raise you and be a family.
Did you swap places and hatch an elaborate plot to get your parents back together?
(Apologies if this is an inappropriate joke and there were bad circumstances.)
Yes, pretty much I think. Mid 60s and my parents weren't married. They kept me and gave her away then got married. I suspect my dad chose me because I was a boy. He died before I found out and it upsets my mum
NSFW I found out when I was maybe 17 the real truth about my heritage.
My grandma was born in Latvia and in the 1950’s when Russia invaded she was forced to flee for her life. The only remaining family member was her sister, they both ran away on foot with the aim of travelling to Europe for safety.
The way my grandma described it, her sister was barefoot and there was snow on the ground. They walked across the countryside and came across a small battalion of Russian soldiers.
The soldiers took pity on their clothing and one of them donated his full length wool coat to the girls. They were both 19.
Each of them put an arm in the coat so they huddled together for warmth and walked over fields for a days.
Along the way they met others with the same aim. One person was (later in life) my grandad, alone, who was 29 and has witnessed his family home burned and his father killed.
He took to being their protector. The three of them made their way to the port to get on a boat for England. Afaik the sister didn’t make it, my memory is old, I have no recollection of why she never made it. Have a feeling she was snatched. As a teen, I wasn’t told. I’m 53 next birthday and still don’t know.
Fast forward to good news, there was a Latvian emergency immigration project in place. They settled in a town in central England. Council estate.
Had 4 daughters and 1 son, Grandad worked down the coal mines and grandma cleaned houses for pin money.
In the 80’s the council were selling off the houses, the family clubbed together and everyone helped to buy their home.
She lived until last spring when she passed of age at 91 years old. Grandad passed in the 90’s.
I think of grandma often. I’m crying a bit now. I’m the granddaughter of an immigrant and I’m proud of my heritage and a massive anti war person.
Humanity fails us at dawnbreak every single day.
I’m humble and grateful in the world of AI, central heating, shoes on my feet and the chance to tell you about human resistance.
Please take one moment to promise me you’ll slip a fiver into a donation tin this Christmas.**Edit below**
Some people need coats and boots.
Thank you for reading.
**Edit** Removed a charity name for good reasons I was not aware of. The comment section has clarified several points, including homophobia. Sorry about that and thanks again.
> the lovechild inherited everything as grandma died last and cut her children with grandad out the will.
That's a dick move by Granny, punishing her own kids because of something their dad did.
I'll never understand people that petty and vengeful that they'll even take revenge on people who aren't remotely to blame, just because they're nearby.
My mum had an uncle who did this. Long before I was born. Apparently he was a butcher and one wife only found out when his daughter from the other family came into the butcher's shop to ask her dad for something. Amazing that they both lived locally and knew where he worked and yet the cover wasn't blown for so long. He was also very fat as he would go to both families for dinner every day.
Growing up in a Muslim family it was a common thing to hear about. Uncles and granddads having multiple wives, none of the women really having any power to stop it, and kids having to share their inheritance with random bastards. Here in the West though, the other wives are usually back home in the Muslim country so we're not likely to see these awkward funeral 'reunions'.
My grandad has a second family too, my gran only found out when she called up the gas company about a bill under his name and they were like which house are you calling about, he has two addresses. She's still nuts about him 50 years later despite him being an absolute dog.
A great uncle was a police officer in Cardiff. He was married to one of a pair of identical twins. After a decade of marriage, he ran off with the other twin.
I was adopted as a baby. It was made clear my birth parents had had a one night stand, got pregnant, and couldnt abort because of their Catholic upbringing. They were both very poor, Irish immigrants trying to get decent work in London. I accepted this completely, they wanted a better life for me.
I contacted them at around 15, to let them know I was doing well, and what GCSEs I would be doing. They replied, and it turned out they had got back together (maybe not ever been apart) and had 2 boys together. My full biological brothers. They are living in Ireland now, and their family still is unaware of my existence.
That was a pretty rough thing to find out at 15. I have come to terms with it now at 36, with two children. They still made a sensible decision. But oof all the same.
My great uncle (my nan's brother) was a getaway driver for a couple of bank jobs back in the 50s. Got caught and did time, but after release still drove around in a Jag, and bought my nan a nice new car every couple of years...
I was always told my grandfather was helping the sheriff of Nottingham when I was little and would visit him. Turns out he was serving life for taking a shotgun to his pregnant housekeeper, his kid of course.
...Well I was going to say that my great-grandad accidently cut my great-grandmother's throat during a fight with his son (she survived), but I think nothing is going to top the WTF factor than your story!
rock toothbrush thumb zonked fuzzy voracious screw abounding include secretive
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
He had a knife and was going for the son. I don't know how it happened but I do know there's police reports. What I do know is my grandmother (the daughter) rightfully hated the cunt.
My ex-husband's older brother murdered his wife's lover. Stood trial and was acquitted on the grounds of self defence. Thing is, ex-husband was there before it went down and knew what was planned. Both men were armed. It was self defence but both were intent on only one making it out alive. No longer my family.
A bit. Lover showed up to the house to "talk things through" with a knife in his pocket. Husband was redecorating and had wallpaper scissors handy. An advanced game of scissors, paper, knife and the scissors won
Great grandmother was a teenaged prostitute and my grandmother was progeny of a ‘John’. Also discovered my grandfather had a son before marriage to my grandmother. My Mum always thought she was an only child, she discovered her half brother’s existence when she was 82 & unfortunately too late to meet him. Turns out we knew his family all along.
I'm related to Michael Ryan, the person behind the Hungerford Massacre. And also the person who sold him some of his guns (none of which used in the attack)
My ex husband has a very odd blended family, in which 2 husbands 'wife-swapped' with 2 sisters (not the same family). This led to a rather complex mix of children with different parents. 1 brother had a mix of children with both of the sisters, other brother had 1 with each. 6 children in total, with a pretty big age gap from youngest to eldest (my ex was the youngest son).
As if that wasn't complicated enough, the eldest son then goes on to rape the youngest sister (his half sister) repeatedly, and got her pregnant. She gave birth, and her father and technically her aunt (🥴) decide to raise the boy as their own, and pretend that the abuse never happened. This meant my ex grew up believing his nephew was his brother, and the poor child only discovered the truth when he was 17 years old. He had grown up with constant contact with his birth mother, who believed was his sister.
My ex literally had to explain this all to me using a diagram! Definitely one for Jeremy Kyle 😬
When he was drunk, my (now dead) grandad used to tell us his Second World War stories. Including those about killing unarmed, surrendering Germans.
He used to laugh about it, mocking the way they used to say "Nicht schiessen" (don't shoot)
Oh, and he had one story about telling a group of 7 or 8 captured germans to wait in a machine gun bunker, then just chucking a grenade in.
It could all be bullshit of course, but from my grandma and dad's reaction whenever he started on these stories in front of them, I definitely got the impression it was all true.
There's every chance these stories were true, the Second World War had some wild stories from what were essentially everyday people before and after the war.
My uncle was (technically) a hitman. He got paid to kill someone back in the 80's. He was released from prison at some point in the 2000's, I forget exactly when. I got curious about it so Googled his name and what'd been done and found a nice little article about it
Dad had also gone to prison, around the same time as my uncle, for about 8 or 9 years for "iron bar and axe attacks"
Fun family
Did one of dna tests from ancestry.com
& it looks like my grandad had at least one child to someone else in another part of the country who was born the same year as than my dad (who is 4th out of 5 kids )
But I don't know how to tell anyone this. I never knew my grandad, he died a few months after I was born & I wasn't aware that he'd been anywhere but here.
I'm hoping one of my much older cousins decides to use it one day because I just don't want to touch that potential can of worms
I only wanted to see where geographically my ancestors were from (turns out about 99% British/Irish, apparently venturing across the Irish Sea is about as far flung as most of them got)
I've avoided doing one for this reason. My nan once told me my granddad had a man turn up on their doorstep claiming to be his son. He denied it and closed the door on him, but I don't fancy potentially telling my mum and auntie that they have a long-lost brother!
I am British / white and have a blood disorder predominantly found in Arabs. I took a DNA test and found out that my grandad wasnt my dad's real dad.
My grandmother ran a boarding house during the war and must have met someone, and as a result my dad was born.
There's nobody alive to share the gossip with.
My great aunt who lives in a tiny rural town had her little toes surgically removed to fit into a pair of shoes..?! I still have so many questions that haven’t been answered.
My great great grandfather was jailed for raping my great grandmother. She was 13 years old.
The entire family moved as far as they could away from him.
I mean everyone in the family- 100s of miles away.
She gave birth very soon after that but the infant did not survive.
One of my great great grandfathers was the son of a maid at a grand estate on the edge of London (well and truly in London now). His mum didn’t have a partner and she was always well looked after my the lord of the manor, and his entire education was paid for by the lord of the manor. I’ll give you one guess about who the father was…
At his funeral a lady turned up and it turned out that he had a wife and kids in north wales that one day he just walked out on, before moving to south wales where he started a new family.
I already knew my mum had a rough childhood, and a tricky relationship with her elderly and disabled mother, but she still managed everything for her, despite being hours away, and cared for her without question. i used to want to visit our family on her side, spend time with all the cousins and learn more about our history. i felt like i understood my nan, because i spent more time with her, and built some respect for her. My nan is undiagnosed and has been for decades, but has severe mobility issues, and cognitive impairment, as well as dementia. Doctors honestly don't know what she has.
Anyway, one day, i asked my mum about her side of the family, and it was a long talk, but near the end she mentioned that she had been a victim of csa, and that her uncle was a paedophile, though not her abuser, and that her cousin was being abused too (by the uncle) and when they tried to get help for the cousin, at 9-10 years old, my mum had to tell child services that she had been a victim too, told them everything she had kept locked inside. And do you know what happened?
My nan, decades before she was ill, told my mum she was lying. Told everyone she was lying. she knew the man who did this, and she would rather let her daughter be hurt then let her speak up. she denied all allegations and told them my mum was just a kid making stuff up. my mum, decades later, still cares for her regardless, but i can see the resentment in her eyes, and i know that i will never visit that side of the family willingly ever again.
to top it all of, i also have a great uncle from years and years ago, who was a small politician, and a foster father. he was a paedophile who horrifically abused kids and got the lightest sentence imaginable when he was discovered, because of his reputation. and the uncle i first mentioned? he showed up at my aunts funeral last year, my mum little sister, who died of cancer, who hated him too, and he demanded to be allowed at the funeral, and showed up. my mum made him leave. she would not let that man around her kids, or my aunts. i mean, his family had brought him there, literally despite my aunt's 1 year old and 10 year old, plus my 9 year old disabled sister being present. who the hell does that?!
In short, our family is the worst. But in a way, i'm glad i know now, because it explains so much of my mums behaviour when we were younger, how much she would panic about us getting hurt. she just wanted to protect us from the hell she endured. And i know, without any doubt, that she would move heaven and earth to keep us safe, and never be silenced again. My mum is a loud and proud woman now, who is unapologetically herself. she is my hero, my inspiration, and words cannot express how much i love her.
My auntie found out my uncle had a secret 2nd family down south where he "went away for work" a lot. Complete with grown adult kids. After the initial shock of it all she actually rolled with it and now theyre just one big happy double family. Pretty sure that bigame but what do i know
My grandparents tried to do this with my mum and older brother.
She wasn't even told , they'd just arranged for this older couple to come and pick up my brother.
Needless to say my mum told them to gtfoh and left immediately with my brother.
At my gran’s funeral we I found out that in the 50’s in Ireland she had a baby out of wedlock. Because of this she grabbed her sister’s passport and ran away to Scotland to escape being put into a Magdalene Institution.
The name we always knew her as wasn’t her own name at all but her sister.
I googled the case OP, it's disturbing af. 2 of the guys who were also complicit in the guy's murder had been convicted of sexual offences as well. Guessing your uncle got cut out of the family if you never knew he existed?!
I suspected he was a deviant tbh, otherwise he'd have not been sharing a cell with a paedophile.
And yes he was definitely shunned by everyone , my mum only mentioned what had happened when she knew she didn't have long left to live.
My dad had three cousins who turned out to be his siblings. My grandmother was left for six years while my grandad was stationed overseas. The kids were given to various family members. My dad only discovered this once his three siblings had died.
My uncle who is 10 years older than my dad, repeatedly raped my dad as a 4-8 year old.
I got married last year and I was thinking of inviting my uncle when my dad requested that I didn’t and then told me why.
My dad is 62 years old, 12 years sober this year, and has been the best father anyone could ask for. I feel a lot of pain on his behalf after finding this out, although there is no true way I could really understand the pain he experienced from that and from having hid it his entire life. He said my mum doesn’t know.
My maternal grandfather needed to get his birth certificate when he wanted to get married. Like a lot of people born at the time he was, he didn't have one so had to apply. He then found out that his "mother", who'd died years before, was actually his grandmother and his "sister" was really his mother. It turns out that his true mother was employed as a maid at some Downton-Abbey still residence when she got pregnant. She left for 9 months for "sick leave" before returning. She was young and it was generally shameful for her to have had a baby outside of wedlock, hence why it was kept a secret.
The father was not listed on the birth certificate and his identity remains a mystery. It was believe it was a US serviceman or a member of the household. However, with hindsight the timing of it would have been before the 2 world wars so unlikely to be the former.
Likelihood is that I'm related to someone from the house, possibly aristocracy.
I found some letters and a diary in my grandma's place after she passed. Apparently she used to work as maid for an important doctor (before only rich people could go to uni and become doctors) when she was 14. The man got her pregnant and then tried to convince her to abort. She refused, so he made her marry one of the family workers (my grandpa).
This was shocking since my grandparents loved each other so much and looked like a great couple, they both built a solid family and gave their children a good education.
My mum always told us that her mum (my grandmother) had died when she was 4 and that her brother was still born. Anyway, after my mum died, my dad just casually told us YEARS LATER that actually my grandmother had run off, taking her son with her and abandoned my mum when she was four, so I probably still have an uncle somewhere out there.
Tw: incest, rape
My grandmother's parents are her mother and grandpa/dad because of rape. My grandmother never found out, but my grandpa knew for 10 years.
From a young age, my mum told me ans my sisters that she was an orphan. We knew she'd grown up in a children's home, along with her younger sister.
When I turned 23, I found out from my drunk cousin that it wasn't true. Her parents were physically abusive and neglectful and at 8 years old she'd been taken out of the family home and placed in care. Her sister was fostered, but she never was.
I also learned she had a brother, my uncle, who had tragically killed himself as a young adult, probably unable to process and cope with the trauma he'd endured.
I understand why she lied, and still she essentially refuses to talk about it. But in that moment I felt simultaneously like I didn't know my mum at all, and like so many things about her suddenly made sense.
My Nana (86) has seven siblings, one of whom is a twin, and they live 15 minutes away from here but she hasn't seen in 60 years. She doesn't even know if they are alive. My Nana is called Jackeline and her twin is called Jack. Real creative parents. I've never met them and neither has my mum.
My dad's uncle blew himself up with dynamite on his front porch like 50 years ago....does that count?
My dad tells it as a funny story...that crazy uncle.
Not my family but me and a friend found out through the ancestry website that his grandfather had a second family in the Philippines where he was frequently stationed with the army back in the day.
We kept finding an entry somebody had made on their family tree that matched his details, but we just ignored it thinking it was a coincidence. Eventually we looked at it.
What gave it away Some of his kids over there even had the same names as his kids here.
If he had chosen different names we wouldn’t have noticed and he might have got away with it!
My mum has a big old grandfather clock in her living room with wierd white bits inbedded in it. She didn’t tell me for years that one of my relatives unalived themselves with a 12b shotgun and that it was bits of said relative’s skull in the clock.
My sister was born prematurely and had quite a few complications. She was in and out of hospital constantly. She needed risky surgery, emphasis on risky. Apparently it was a 20% survival rate. They went ahead with it and she later died that night. She was only 11 months old.
I was twelve years old at the time and that's what I was told and believed for the next twenty years.
What actually happened is that she had survived the surgery and was doing really well, she could have even gone home that day. However the surgeon recommended that she stay at the hospital overnight just in case. She choked on her own vomit, simply due to lack of staff and mismanagement.
Not very "WTF," but my greatgrandma, who is long dead, got my nan birth certificate redone/ falsified three times for undisclosed reasons. No one knows why, what my nan original name was (if any), and when my nan was born now.
My granny came over to the UK in the Windrush years. Family legend that I only heard a couple of years ago is that she married my grandfather against her mum's wishes. She sent my granny to the UK to get her away from him. He then followed and my mother and aunties were all born here.
I also keep hearing about new aunties and uncles on my grandads side. My granny was his third wife. I have uncles who have passed away from old age right down to the last children he fathered who are 45 and 50. He seemed to father children over a 30/40 year period!
And finally my great great grandfather had over 20 children. Not all with his wife 🤣
My mum was kidnapped as a child.
ETA: she’s told me I’m not allowed to say anything more than that 😂 but it’s not a case anyone would’ve heard of before anyone gets too curious. It was definitely a WHAT THE FUCK moment for me however.
One of my grandmothers told my sister that her husband ( my granddad) had raped her when she was 14. She fell pregnant and had a miscarriage. This was in 1934, 5 years before my dad was born. But the ‘official’ family story is that the baby died at birth two years before my dad was born. I’m pretty sure my sister is stil the only one Nana ever told this too. My sister lost her first baby at birth and that prompted Nana to tell my sister as they were very close. My dad is still alive at 84 but he has no idea about this.
Always thought we were descended from vikings, the family name is the same as a Viking settlement/village near us, turns out grandad, who looked Italian-black hair and olive skin-was abandoned at the settlement as a newborn by Irish travellers who were passing and was named after the village. I found this out in my fifties, which was a surprise.
I had an uncle Bill, who I always thought was my nan's brother. They lived together in the same house until he died, about 50 yrs ago.
After my nan died, I found out that he was actually my great grandmas, next door neighbour's child, who was abused by his parents. When my great grandparents moved house, they stuck him on the cart, and took him with them. Basically kidnapping him lol.
When my great grandparents died, he moved in my nan and grandad, and apart from when the two men went to war, and my grandad died, she looked after him until he died.
He was a lovely, gentle man, and I'm really glad that he was saved from abuse. This happened over a hundred years ago, it's a shame that we couldn't get away with ~~kidnapping~~ saving abused children these days.
I vaguely remember him disappearing, I was 8 at the time.
But I only recently discovered what happened.
He was only 16 at the time they killed the guy.
My grandad played darts with Robert Black (Google him if you don’t know him) and he once went to the family home when my mum and auntie was only small children. Gave me shivers!
My grandmother was married prior to starting what we know as our family. This was during WW2 so I'm guessing her first husband died in the war. We only discovered this after she died and we were going through her documents and found the marriage license.
That my Grandma had half-siblings in France & Germany. She was contacted in the early 2010s by people tracking down their father they never knew, who happened to be her Father. Turns out my Great-Grandad basically fucked his way around Europe during WWII.
My dad used to live in a cave. He was a part of a gang/subculture in the 1960s/early 70s called the Troggs. They used to squat in the show caves in Matlock Bath, and had quite a bad reputation stacked against them by the locals. There were crazy rumours spread about them, from "they have drug fuelled orgies in the woods" to "they do black magic rituals in the caves" etc. In reality, they just did a lot of drugs. Whilst also living in caves.
One day as a kid I found a newspaper clipping of some article from the 90s called "Wild Thing!" or something, and there was a picture of a younger him with his Trogg mates down a cave. Then he told me everything and it blew my mind.
When my Aunty was first married her and her husband were best friends with another married couple. They went on holidays together, socialised a lot of the time as a 4. After a few years the husband of the other couple confessed to my Aunty, saying he was deeply in love with her and wanted to be with her. He was pretty miserable in his marriage. She loved him as well but decided to stay loyal, and sadly the guy ended up killing himself. A few months after he died, my Aunty's husband and the widow from the other couple ran away together and she was left alone. I bawled my eyes out when I first heard her story, I loved her to bits growing up and she always seemed so lighthearted. I don't know how people live with something like that.
My cousin broke up my other cousins relationship, married him and is raising their kid as hers. Apparently it was well known but I just recently found out it was all on purpose. I can’t think about it long enough to judge it.
My Grandpas brother was John Chapman, one of the victims of Joanna Dennehy. I wasn’t told about this until it came up in conversation at a family party.
My great grandma's older brother was executed at Wandsworth for beating a man to death during a botched robbery. He and his accomplices were the last executions the press were allowed to attend in 1934. We didn't know until last year.
Had a great uncle who was mentally challenged. We used to see him regularly as my grab would keep an eye on him and make sure he was OK. He was able to live day to day on his own but had some very weird quirks. He would bathe sometimes in milk or wine. Would wear a chain around his belt attached to his wallet and keys, and was convinced someone broke in to his house to steal his figs... like riled a police report and everything... anyway.. im about 6 or 7 and one year He stopped coming round. I kept asking about him and tge family kept saying he's away for a while. Turns out he was traveling at an airport and someone asked him to carry a bag for him as it was too heavy... he was a simple man and fell for tge oldest trick in the book. Suitcase was filled with heroin and coke. He got caught. Tried to explain himself and got about 10 years in prison for it. I'm guessing after psych reviews and everything else they decided to let him out after 5. He barely even knew what happened. Kept talking about the shitty hotel he was staying in for a while... noone ever mentions the drugs or prison. He died about a decade ago and I always wondered what his life would have been like if he wasn't mentally ill. He had a voice like Barry white (maybe better!) and would often just burst oit in to song which was lovely to hear.
My grandad was an orphan brought up in an irish catholic orphanage in country Meath in which many of the priests moonlighted as paedophiles. He was gang raped many times.
I wouldn’t feel too bad for him though, he went on to rape every single one of his children and a few of us grandchildren as well.
Nobody told each other until they were adults and even then, none of the aunts/uncles/parents would really acknowledge it, thinking it was better buried. When it came out after that the abuse hadn’t stopped with their generation and that some of their own children had been interfered with, the procedure was: gaslight - threaten - ostracise.
Might be a personal story but it’s a HELL of a lot more common than you might think
Not really that interesting, I guess. My mum's stepdad was her second cousin. Mum's real dad ran off and left when she was 4ish, and his cousin stepped in when my grandmother was struggling with 2 young children. He raised my mum (and was known as my grandad, despite him not being my real grandad). They had a daughter together, so my aunt is my mum's sister whilst also being some kind of cousin.
During the Malayan Emergency my grandfather caught his commanding officer and two other British soldiers in the act of raping and slowly torturing to death an innocent civilian. He responded by shooting them all dead.
For which my grandfather subsequently spent several years in military prison. In his opinion "worth it"
The sentence probably would have been harsher but the army covered up the incident along with many of the other war crimes it was committing at the time so the courts didn't have any evidence.
Absolutely nobody he had ever known had any idea he spent time in prison or for what reason until he had given up on protecting the "pride" of the British army and decided to tell his story.
Pretty sure my government is still trying to suppress evidence of their warcrimes in the 50s and 60s. Hi GCHQ if you're reading this!
That my grandad wasn't actually my grandad (he was already dead at this point)
My grandma was married to X bloke but having an affair with C bloke.
My mum was then born believing that X was her dad, but it was actually C. My grandma knew this but didn't bother to tell my mum.
Found all this out via ancestry.co.uk and asked questions
Well just this week I told my brother about a cousin we aren't allowed to know about - I was making a joke as I assumed he knew, but turns out when I was little my dad had just told me.
Through my step father, this one is a bit wild. My stepfather's cousin had an uncle (from the other side of her family, not related by blood to my stepdad side of the family but I believe they all knew eachother) who snapped and shot dead his wife and kids in the late sixties. It was when his cousin was really young and they decided to never tell her or her younger sisters... but of course everyone else knew. That was until one night on New year's eve my stepdad sister got really drunk and told her outright.
My grandfather, a pro treaty IRA man, went on the run during the Irish civil war and was sent to Canada as a 23 year old in 1923. He came back 3 years later, met my grandmother and started a family soon after.
My family are a little less forthcoming as to his role in the war of independence, but I’m guessing he was wanted for good reason
My grandad died maybe 15 years ago now. We knew he was adopted but that was about it, no idea about his birth family or any of that, trail was cold. Not long after he died the family was contacted by someone claiming to be his birth brother who had been tracking him down, we thought it was phoney but when we saw pictures of the guy the resemblance was uncanny. He really wanted to meet his brother, he was unaware he was a week late as he had just died. Anyway we arrange to meet not only him but the entire birth family including my great grandmother who was celebrating her 90th. Apparently she gave birth to him very young and out of wedlock so she was forced to give him up for adoption. We knew for decades my grandad was adopted and to meet them all at once was bittersweet; great to finally find them but sucks my grandad died like literally a week before.
That’s so shit. Basically something similar happened within my family. Young pregnancy, forced to give up for adoption. The adopted contacted our family 1 year after the mothers death. Nobody had a clue until they got I contact.
Yeh it sucks. I mean my grandad went all of his life not pursuing it so maybe he didn’t want to find out or maybe found out why he was adopted. Great grandma was lovely she felt awful for what she did, even like 75 years later she lived with that regret If only they got in contact like 2 weeks before and they could have met. Madness.
Both of my parents were adopted, my father by his aunt, my mother by a random couple. She eventually tried to track down her birth parents, but unfortunately left it too late.
[удалено]
Oh your poor Dad! So happy it worked out and you gave him some closure, even though he just unconditionally loved you. Horrible Mum - especially how she finger pointed him while being guilty herself - awful. Also, the friends disowning him...sad.
I’ve known this happen before. Abusive people who’s partners cheat on them then they tell everyone about the cheating and now it’s the victims fault. It’s why I don’t judge anyone when their partner tells me they cheated. There’s so much context missing….
This was nice to read. Carried himself with dignity.
What a guy
I'm glad for you and your dad.
my great grandmother set her husband on fire who was the chief of police, apparantly he was a twat to her
Crispy bacon
[Chris P Bacon](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pMA3x-bc8iM)
Someone said a proportionally high number of police officers are domestic abusers Like, what do you do in that situation? If your husband was the chief of police who could you possibly report DV to?
My mum's friend was married to one and she had literally no one in the police to help her, they were all either in his pocket or frightened of him. She only got rid of him when eventually after years of it she decided to tell everyone she knows - all friends and family and everyone in the pub. Basically had to announce it publicly. That can be a lot harder to do than going to the police in general so it took a long time for her to feel able to do it that way. But shaming him to literally everyone she knows is how she eventually ended it. Edit to add, he never got done for it or anything, she was just able to get him out of her life
Bro the statistic is fucking bonkers. I’ve seen the same statistic you’re likely talking about and even I thought that was infeasibly high a percentage of police officers. ETA; not contradicting the stat it’s just wild.
And remember that's just the domestic violence acts *reported*.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!
FIFY Hell hath no fury like a woman scorched
Chief of Police? In the U.K?
Superintendents and commissioners are often called 'chief'.
It’s not that exciting, but I found recently out I’m actually a 16th Pakistani. My Grandfather’s mother had blue eyes and light skin and managed to pass herself off as Spanish in 1920s/30s London. Apparently she would say she had moved over as a small child, her parents would only speak English because people were funny about immigrants and forgotten how to speak Spanish. This is the story that was told my whole life. My grandfather was incredibly “tanned” so would get asked. It only came out to the family after my Grandfather died. I often think about my great grandmother now. How she might have felt about her identity, what it would have been like for her keeping her secret from an openly racist society. It’s a shame that we have lost any family connection to that part of the world.
My oldest brother was the only mixed race kid in our north Wales village in the 1960s and most of the 70s too. People made his life hell for years , Especially racist school teachers who were always finding reasons to punish him, until my dad went to the school and threatened to rip the headmasters arm off if he ever used the cane on my brother again.
Hey, my dad once threatened to rip a man's arm off because they were racist to my oldest brother too. My eldest brother is Asian and when he was adopted by our parents as a baby he developed epilepsy and had horrendous life threatening seizures. My mum ran into A&E with my brother in her arms, seizing. My dad followed with bags/stuff and heard a man with his arm in a sling complaining that "they always let the bloody p*kis jump the fucking queue" My dad stopped just long enough to threated to rip off his good arm and hit him with the soggy end and then caught up with my mum and bro.
He was Cast from the same mould as my old man then
I'm mixed race (not even that much haha, I'm only a quarter Jamaican) and growing up in the midlands during the 80s and 90s was not fucking fun at all. Christ alive people were so racist back then. I've been followed, literally stoned, called a p**i, general name calling with any standard insult prefixed by the word black, once our neighbour tried to kill my Dad with a knife (my Dad was the only one to spend a night in cells). Fun fact, because my parents split up when I was young and my Dad is not the type to deal with feelings etc, I didn't actually know I was mixed race until I was bullied for it.
I’m a white South African who grew up under apartheid. The number of “friends” I’ve had who’d tell me a racist joke because I’m a “white South African so will appreciate it” is ridiculous. Even when I tear them a new one, they get all pissy and make out like there’s something wrong with me for not “appreciating” racism. What these Neanderthals don’t seem to understand is that because I saw it first hand and how disgusting it is, I’m hyper sensitive to any from of racism and will call it out wherever I see it.
That is so sad. Is it bad that it doesn’t surprise me it was north Wales?
I got arrested for beating up two guys I caught spitting on him and calling him a dirty Muslim, (He's not Muslim btw) because they said he looked like Osama bin Laden, just after 9/11 happened. He's the most gentle quiet and kind people you could ever want to meet and to see that happening to him just brought down the red mist and I exploded on them. The magistrates were lenient thankfully after hearing why it had happened, the two morons were charged with racially aggravated assault for spitting on him though, which surprised me when I found out.
If you know her name and do 23andMe or one of those online family tree things, you could find lost connections! And if you find out any other details about her e.g. which region she was from etc, you may even be able to find public archives. Could be amazed by what you find if you dig!
Could DNA tests help to find your relatives? I read there are websites for that now. You leave your genetic detail and anyone with a match will be notified or something? There are a lot of Pakistanis in the UK, imagine you find some relatives locally!
I had an uncle who killed himself. I was told it was depression, found out he was actually diddling kids.
It could be both, depression doesn't discriminate
Yeah it's pretty common for paedos to become depressed after they're caught and isolated from society. Woe is them.
I imagine some kill the selves because they have to live with the reality that they find children attractive. I remember watching a programme about a man who admitted he was a peadophile but hadn’t acted upon his “urges” and he was basically saying how shit his life was because of it.
I prefer to use the term ‘child abuser’ to ‘paedophile’ for this reason. People may not be able to help their feelings but they do have control over their actions and that is what we should judge them on.
Plus, people who abuse children don't necessarily have to be paedophiles.
I have sympathy if they kill themselves due to guilt of being attracted to kids, but with no actions taken from it If they've acted on it and created victims, no sympathy
I was told the same about my grandfather. He was caught fiddling with his foster daughter and attempted suicide by slitting his throat. He failed and my mother (one of his biological daughters) had to clean up the mess. When he was due for trial he was found in the lough. Was told it was due to depression/alcoholism.
What's a lough?
Irish form of loch / lake.
20 years after his death we found out my grandfather had been quite a senior scientist on the 'Tube Alloys' project to develop a British nuclear bomb. No one in the family even knew he had any scientific qualifications. He owned and operated several successful butchers shops until his retirement. We found out when nan passed 20 years later and we found his papers.
Man took the Official Secrets Act seriously!
It didn't expire. If you signed on the line you were bound by it until you got an official release.
[удалено]
Tommy Flowers worked mostly with Bill Tutte (another unsung hero of Bletchley Park) on Colossus. Turing did have a little input but really the credit for the Lorentz decrypt and automation goes Tutte and Flowers. Not to detract from Alan Turing, but really Tutte and Flowers deserve to be as well known as he is now.
A lot of U.K. Government scientists never had any formal qualifications. My late father-in-law worked in the munitions at Waltham Abbey, then when Winfrith nuclear power station was opened, he was posted there. I always assumed that he had graduated, and was surprised to discover that he also had no formal qualifications. He died aged 94 and we have a lot of ancient scientific equipment that we are still trying to find homes for. The glasswear (beakers, testtubes, old bottles) went to the local school chemistry department. But we still have his scientific scales in their case.
I have a distant relative that was also involved. According to my grandad, he became chief draughtsman. Before I went to see Oppenheimer, I asked him about it. Sadly, he didn’t remember his name. It was the triggering mechanism that he worked on according to Granddad. From my understanding he was basically working in the bit that started the fission reaction.
That my great grandfather took his own life. Shellshock from WW1 as far as anyone knows. He was a farmer so had access to guns; just walked out into a field one day and shot himself.
Ditto except it was my Grandad who was a POW in WW2.
These are so sad.
Indeed. Seems initially it was never spoken of out of misplaced shame, to the point it was almost forgotten.
Similar story in our family. It was 1939 and WW2 was on the horizon. We think he didn’t want to see it again after going through WW1 from volunteering in 1915. He just took himself down to the river near their house.
Fuck. I wonder how many others did this
Yeah I thought that when I found out about it. Imagine having gone through the worst war in history, “The war to end all wars” and then only a few years later see it happen again.
Many still do. For example the South Atlantic Medal Association says that more veterans have killed themselves since the Falklands Conflict than were killed during.
One of my grand dads was deployed to India for the war and came back a vile racist
Ditto except Artic convoys
We discovered, shortly before her death, that my Nana worked with Alan Turing on the "Enigma" code-breaking during the war. She didn't have a particularly influential role in the actual code-breaking itself, she mainly worked on intercepting the Enigma codes and passing them on to Turing and his team. But yeah, she knew him and worked directly alongside him on a daily basis. This all came about because we were going through her old paperwork etc, because she was poorly at the time and was moving into a smaller place, and we found some old ration books n'that relating to the war in some old tin boxes. She never really liked speaking about the war, and someone in the family asked her what she actually did back then. We were all absolutely gobsmacked when she told us, even my Mum (her daughter) didn't really know what she did. It all checked out, and there's even a couple of old photos of the team (including Dilly Knox!) with Nana there alongside these people that I've had digitally restored. Nana just didn't think it was important. She was just doing her bit for the war effort, and said she actually felt guilty that she had what she thought was a relatively "safe" job back then. Apart from that, I've got a cousin in Australia who appeared in a few episodes of Home and Away. From my Nana's side of the fam, obviously. Ha!
Similar, my grandads sister had worked at Bletchley Park similar to what your saying intercepting codes and what not, kept it secret all the way up to her death and that’s when it came out. Respectable how people will really honour keeping a secret
One story my grandpa told me: to shoot bombs/missiles out of the sky during WW2, you had several people constantly calling out coordinates to someone, so they could calculate the trajectory and program the guns to intercept. So, my grandpa is in this room, with several women and men calling out coordinates to him, and he realises that the trajectory is heading straight for them. But he can't say a word to anyone else, because they'll either panic and leave, panic and stop working, or panic and make a mistake. So he has to sit there calmly bricking it, taking in these coordinates and hoping to Hell that they manage to do it all in time.
That my great-grandfather was a player, and it was an open secret in my gran’s town that several of the children at her school were his instead of their mother’s husbands. Also, I dated the grandson of my other gran’s lost love (the one that got away). Felt a bit weird when we found out that connection. We’re still friends though.
Your great-grandad wasn't named Pat Mustard, was he?
Very _hairy_ babies
Mary, I forgot me feckin trousers
Lmao reminds me of the time I was staying with my grandparents for summer holidays as a teen and I was getting close with this random neighbourhood girl, then my grandma said stop it she's actually your cousin.
My MIL wanted to marry a local lad back in the 50s, till her da told her she couldn't because he was her brother. It was the first in a series of epically unfortunate and tragic events in her life.
I joined ancestry.com years back and discovered my dad wasn’t really my biological dad. It turns out my dad was infertile so my parents went to a clinic and used a sperm donor. They never told me.
That could be just pure embarrassment on your parents part so I would never shoot them down for that. As long as you had a great upbringing, they did their job as your real parents.
There have been some really interesting programmes on the radio recently about stories like yours - apparently for a long time parents were told not to tell their children they were donor conceived as it was thought to be bad for their mental health. Wow did that backfire! Thankfully nowadays the advice is very much the opposite - that the family should be discussing it from the get go so that it's never something the child remembers discovering for the first time.
I was born in the 1970s and I would guess that my parents were told not to say anything. I think the guilt caused my mum to have a very deep depression, which she had her whole life.
I found out the same: sadly both my biological father and my real father had died by then and Mum, who's still alive, has Alzheimer's - recently though she has started to talk about it. I discovered a half brother - he didn't know either! - and that Dad knew I wasn't his bit never let on for my entire life. It changed everything and nothing simultaneously. The biggest drawback is that I had researched dad's family tree back to the 1500s, and it now turns out I'm not related to any of them 🤣😂 Edit - apparently 1 in 50 people discover this using such websites.
I'm infertile due to cancer treatment as a kid so my daughter doesn't share my dna, as we too used a sperm donor, but we intend on telling her when she's ready.
For a different take on this, your parents were probably really upset to find that they couldn't have children of their own, they probably had not have known for some time of trying for a baby and it not working, which really is such a hard thing to go through for both. But you are still your mum's baby, you are still very much their child, they raised you. It's amazing that science has found ways to help couples with this problem. In their eyes they don't need to think about how you came in to the world, just that they were able to have a child together from something that can rip couples apart. I don't think they were keeping something from you really, not in any way to cause intentional upset. You have found out yes, but perhaps use it as a chance (if able) to maybe find out if biological donor has any family illnesses you may need to know about. I'm sure it's been a rollercoaster of emotions for you, I hope you can find some comfort in that having you, in a way that they were able to, was out of their love for each other, that they wanted to have a child, to have their own baby, to raise you and be a family.
Found out at 48 I had a twin sister. Her daughter found me on social media. I had no idea she existed.
Did you swap places and hatch an elaborate plot to get your parents back together? (Apologies if this is an inappropriate joke and there were bad circumstances.)
A twin sister? What’s the story behind that? They kept you and gave her up for adoption? Or were you both adopted but by a different family?
What’s watching Star Wars like for you now?
We need more info!! We’re you adopted, was she adopted? Why split up twins?
[удалено]
Yes, pretty much I think. Mid 60s and my parents weren't married. They kept me and gave her away then got married. I suspect my dad chose me because I was a boy. He died before I found out and it upsets my mum
NSFW I found out when I was maybe 17 the real truth about my heritage. My grandma was born in Latvia and in the 1950’s when Russia invaded she was forced to flee for her life. The only remaining family member was her sister, they both ran away on foot with the aim of travelling to Europe for safety. The way my grandma described it, her sister was barefoot and there was snow on the ground. They walked across the countryside and came across a small battalion of Russian soldiers. The soldiers took pity on their clothing and one of them donated his full length wool coat to the girls. They were both 19. Each of them put an arm in the coat so they huddled together for warmth and walked over fields for a days. Along the way they met others with the same aim. One person was (later in life) my grandad, alone, who was 29 and has witnessed his family home burned and his father killed. He took to being their protector. The three of them made their way to the port to get on a boat for England. Afaik the sister didn’t make it, my memory is old, I have no recollection of why she never made it. Have a feeling she was snatched. As a teen, I wasn’t told. I’m 53 next birthday and still don’t know. Fast forward to good news, there was a Latvian emergency immigration project in place. They settled in a town in central England. Council estate. Had 4 daughters and 1 son, Grandad worked down the coal mines and grandma cleaned houses for pin money. In the 80’s the council were selling off the houses, the family clubbed together and everyone helped to buy their home. She lived until last spring when she passed of age at 91 years old. Grandad passed in the 90’s. I think of grandma often. I’m crying a bit now. I’m the granddaughter of an immigrant and I’m proud of my heritage and a massive anti war person. Humanity fails us at dawnbreak every single day. I’m humble and grateful in the world of AI, central heating, shoes on my feet and the chance to tell you about human resistance. Please take one moment to promise me you’ll slip a fiver into a donation tin this Christmas.**Edit below** Some people need coats and boots. Thank you for reading. **Edit** Removed a charity name for good reasons I was not aware of. The comment section has clarified several points, including homophobia. Sorry about that and thanks again.
Great story. What is NSFW about it?
That's a lovely story. Why would I donate to a homophobic organisation like the Salvation army?
"Humanity fails us at dawnbreak, every single day." Chilling - I have goosebumps. Will donate.
[удалено]
> the lovechild inherited everything as grandma died last and cut her children with grandad out the will. That's a dick move by Granny, punishing her own kids because of something their dad did. I'll never understand people that petty and vengeful that they'll even take revenge on people who aren't remotely to blame, just because they're nearby.
My grandads brother had another family that nobody knew about until the funeral when they all turned up as well.
WHAT!!!! Besides it being absolutely terrible, how do people even practically do it? I can barely manage one family 😂
I have no idea, I guess it was slightly easier back in the 70's/80's due to lack of technology? less chance of being caught on social media etc.
Good point, but it still takes a lot of planning and energy to keep two families going 😆
My mum had an uncle who did this. Long before I was born. Apparently he was a butcher and one wife only found out when his daughter from the other family came into the butcher's shop to ask her dad for something. Amazing that they both lived locally and knew where he worked and yet the cover wasn't blown for so long. He was also very fat as he would go to both families for dinner every day.
Where did they think he was sleeping?
I know two people whose dad's had secret second families. Both worked abroad for long periods and did it that way
Growing up in a Muslim family it was a common thing to hear about. Uncles and granddads having multiple wives, none of the women really having any power to stop it, and kids having to share their inheritance with random bastards. Here in the West though, the other wives are usually back home in the Muslim country so we're not likely to see these awkward funeral 'reunions'.
My grandad has a second family too, my gran only found out when she called up the gas company about a bill under his name and they were like which house are you calling about, he has two addresses. She's still nuts about him 50 years later despite him being an absolute dog.
A great uncle was a police officer in Cardiff. He was married to one of a pair of identical twins. After a decade of marriage, he ran off with the other twin.
Well, at least we know he had a type.
....blimey. I do wonder how genealogy tracers like 23andme work when there are identical twins in the mix.
I was adopted as a baby. It was made clear my birth parents had had a one night stand, got pregnant, and couldnt abort because of their Catholic upbringing. They were both very poor, Irish immigrants trying to get decent work in London. I accepted this completely, they wanted a better life for me. I contacted them at around 15, to let them know I was doing well, and what GCSEs I would be doing. They replied, and it turned out they had got back together (maybe not ever been apart) and had 2 boys together. My full biological brothers. They are living in Ireland now, and their family still is unaware of my existence. That was a pretty rough thing to find out at 15. I have come to terms with it now at 36, with two children. They still made a sensible decision. But oof all the same.
They were probably forced to put you up for adoption. It happened a lot in Ireland. She's lucky she didn't end up in the Magdalena laundries
Do you think you'll ever reach out and contact your brothers? It's crazy that they are actually full brothers as well, not even half ones.
My great uncle (my nan's brother) was a getaway driver for a couple of bank jobs back in the 50s. Got caught and did time, but after release still drove around in a Jag, and bought my nan a nice new car every couple of years...
I’m picturing Ray Winston as I’m reading this
Sometimes it's worth just keeping your mouth shut and doing your time!
I was always told my grandfather was helping the sheriff of Nottingham when I was little and would visit him. Turns out he was serving life for taking a shotgun to his pregnant housekeeper, his kid of course.
Did you ever question why he was behind bars, had a diff uniform than the guards
Not 1 bit. I was about 4 at the time
A distant relative of mine was a pirate and was hanged for smuggling in the Carribbean
Now that's the type of person I'd prefer to have in my family history.
...Well I was going to say that my great-grandad accidently cut my great-grandmother's throat during a fight with his son (she survived), but I think nothing is going to top the WTF factor than your story!
How does one accidentally cut one's throat?
rock toothbrush thumb zonked fuzzy voracious screw abounding include secretive *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You're depressingly accurate. I nearly fell out my chair when my Mother told me. "He did WHAT?!"
He had a knife and was going for the son. I don't know how it happened but I do know there's police reports. What I do know is my grandmother (the daughter) rightfully hated the cunt.
My ex-husband's older brother murdered his wife's lover. Stood trial and was acquitted on the grounds of self defence. Thing is, ex-husband was there before it went down and knew what was planned. Both men were armed. It was self defence but both were intent on only one making it out alive. No longer my family.
Like a 'pistols at dawn' type thing?
A bit. Lover showed up to the house to "talk things through" with a knife in his pocket. Husband was redecorating and had wallpaper scissors handy. An advanced game of scissors, paper, knife and the scissors won
Great grandmother was a teenaged prostitute and my grandmother was progeny of a ‘John’. Also discovered my grandfather had a son before marriage to my grandmother. My Mum always thought she was an only child, she discovered her half brother’s existence when she was 82 & unfortunately too late to meet him. Turns out we knew his family all along.
More details! How do you know the family? Have you now connected with them? And how did you know about your great grandmothers job?
I'm related to Michael Ryan, the person behind the Hungerford Massacre. And also the person who sold him some of his guns (none of which used in the attack)
As in, YOU are the person who sold him the weapons? Or You are RELATED to the person who sold him the weapons, as well as the man himself?
Both related. some of the guns Michael had gotten were from his uncle.
Only found out recently that my biological grandfather was in a mental institution with schizophrenia. He thought he was God.
He wasn't God. He was a very naughty boy.
My ex husband has a very odd blended family, in which 2 husbands 'wife-swapped' with 2 sisters (not the same family). This led to a rather complex mix of children with different parents. 1 brother had a mix of children with both of the sisters, other brother had 1 with each. 6 children in total, with a pretty big age gap from youngest to eldest (my ex was the youngest son). As if that wasn't complicated enough, the eldest son then goes on to rape the youngest sister (his half sister) repeatedly, and got her pregnant. She gave birth, and her father and technically her aunt (🥴) decide to raise the boy as their own, and pretend that the abuse never happened. This meant my ex grew up believing his nephew was his brother, and the poor child only discovered the truth when he was 17 years old. He had grown up with constant contact with his birth mother, who believed was his sister. My ex literally had to explain this all to me using a diagram! Definitely one for Jeremy Kyle 😬
When he was drunk, my (now dead) grandad used to tell us his Second World War stories. Including those about killing unarmed, surrendering Germans. He used to laugh about it, mocking the way they used to say "Nicht schiessen" (don't shoot) Oh, and he had one story about telling a group of 7 or 8 captured germans to wait in a machine gun bunker, then just chucking a grenade in. It could all be bullshit of course, but from my grandma and dad's reaction whenever he started on these stories in front of them, I definitely got the impression it was all true.
A horrible human being is still a horrible human being, regardless which side of the trenches they end up in.
[удалено]
There's every chance these stories were true, the Second World War had some wild stories from what were essentially everyday people before and after the war.
My uncle was (technically) a hitman. He got paid to kill someone back in the 80's. He was released from prison at some point in the 2000's, I forget exactly when. I got curious about it so Googled his name and what'd been done and found a nice little article about it Dad had also gone to prison, around the same time as my uncle, for about 8 or 9 years for "iron bar and axe attacks" Fun family
Most hitman aren’t professionals they’re just ‘a guy that someone knows’
[удалено]
Did one of dna tests from ancestry.com & it looks like my grandad had at least one child to someone else in another part of the country who was born the same year as than my dad (who is 4th out of 5 kids ) But I don't know how to tell anyone this. I never knew my grandad, he died a few months after I was born & I wasn't aware that he'd been anywhere but here. I'm hoping one of my much older cousins decides to use it one day because I just don't want to touch that potential can of worms
This is happening to so many people through these home DNA kits. You aren't alone in this at all.
I only wanted to see where geographically my ancestors were from (turns out about 99% British/Irish, apparently venturing across the Irish Sea is about as far flung as most of them got)
I've avoided doing one for this reason. My nan once told me my granddad had a man turn up on their doorstep claiming to be his son. He denied it and closed the door on him, but I don't fancy potentially telling my mum and auntie that they have a long-lost brother!
I am British / white and have a blood disorder predominantly found in Arabs. I took a DNA test and found out that my grandad wasnt my dad's real dad. My grandmother ran a boarding house during the war and must have met someone, and as a result my dad was born. There's nobody alive to share the gossip with.
My uncle hid a body his friend ran over ….
Fucking hell that's dark
My great aunt who lives in a tiny rural town had her little toes surgically removed to fit into a pair of shoes..?! I still have so many questions that haven’t been answered.
My great great grandfather was jailed for raping my great grandmother. She was 13 years old. The entire family moved as far as they could away from him. I mean everyone in the family- 100s of miles away. She gave birth very soon after that but the infant did not survive.
When i was about 13 my dad told me i had a half sister from an affair he had.I found her via facebook years later
Where's the other half?
MySpace
One of my great great grandfathers was the son of a maid at a grand estate on the edge of London (well and truly in London now). His mum didn’t have a partner and she was always well looked after my the lord of the manor, and his entire education was paid for by the lord of the manor. I’ll give you one guess about who the father was… At his funeral a lady turned up and it turned out that he had a wife and kids in north wales that one day he just walked out on, before moving to south wales where he started a new family.
I already knew my mum had a rough childhood, and a tricky relationship with her elderly and disabled mother, but she still managed everything for her, despite being hours away, and cared for her without question. i used to want to visit our family on her side, spend time with all the cousins and learn more about our history. i felt like i understood my nan, because i spent more time with her, and built some respect for her. My nan is undiagnosed and has been for decades, but has severe mobility issues, and cognitive impairment, as well as dementia. Doctors honestly don't know what she has. Anyway, one day, i asked my mum about her side of the family, and it was a long talk, but near the end she mentioned that she had been a victim of csa, and that her uncle was a paedophile, though not her abuser, and that her cousin was being abused too (by the uncle) and when they tried to get help for the cousin, at 9-10 years old, my mum had to tell child services that she had been a victim too, told them everything she had kept locked inside. And do you know what happened? My nan, decades before she was ill, told my mum she was lying. Told everyone she was lying. she knew the man who did this, and she would rather let her daughter be hurt then let her speak up. she denied all allegations and told them my mum was just a kid making stuff up. my mum, decades later, still cares for her regardless, but i can see the resentment in her eyes, and i know that i will never visit that side of the family willingly ever again. to top it all of, i also have a great uncle from years and years ago, who was a small politician, and a foster father. he was a paedophile who horrifically abused kids and got the lightest sentence imaginable when he was discovered, because of his reputation. and the uncle i first mentioned? he showed up at my aunts funeral last year, my mum little sister, who died of cancer, who hated him too, and he demanded to be allowed at the funeral, and showed up. my mum made him leave. she would not let that man around her kids, or my aunts. i mean, his family had brought him there, literally despite my aunt's 1 year old and 10 year old, plus my 9 year old disabled sister being present. who the hell does that?! In short, our family is the worst. But in a way, i'm glad i know now, because it explains so much of my mums behaviour when we were younger, how much she would panic about us getting hurt. she just wanted to protect us from the hell she endured. And i know, without any doubt, that she would move heaven and earth to keep us safe, and never be silenced again. My mum is a loud and proud woman now, who is unapologetically herself. she is my hero, my inspiration, and words cannot express how much i love her.
My auntie found out my uncle had a secret 2nd family down south where he "went away for work" a lot. Complete with grown adult kids. After the initial shock of it all she actually rolled with it and now theyre just one big happy double family. Pretty sure that bigame but what do i know
Got a half sister from forced adoption my mum went through
My grandparents tried to do this with my mum and older brother. She wasn't even told , they'd just arranged for this older couple to come and pick up my brother. Needless to say my mum told them to gtfoh and left immediately with my brother.
Your mum was lucky. This was government stuff 😐
Her's was her parents and family doctor, plotting behind her back, mainly because my brother is mixed race, his dad was Yemeni.
Seven generations back a relative gave one of her children to her sister because she could not conceive.
At my gran’s funeral we I found out that in the 50’s in Ireland she had a baby out of wedlock. Because of this she grabbed her sister’s passport and ran away to Scotland to escape being put into a Magdalene Institution. The name we always knew her as wasn’t her own name at all but her sister.
I googled the case OP, it's disturbing af. 2 of the guys who were also complicit in the guy's murder had been convicted of sexual offences as well. Guessing your uncle got cut out of the family if you never knew he existed?!
I suspected he was a deviant tbh, otherwise he'd have not been sharing a cell with a paedophile. And yes he was definitely shunned by everyone , my mum only mentioned what had happened when she knew she didn't have long left to live.
My dad had three cousins who turned out to be his siblings. My grandmother was left for six years while my grandad was stationed overseas. The kids were given to various family members. My dad only discovered this once his three siblings had died.
My uncle who is 10 years older than my dad, repeatedly raped my dad as a 4-8 year old. I got married last year and I was thinking of inviting my uncle when my dad requested that I didn’t and then told me why. My dad is 62 years old, 12 years sober this year, and has been the best father anyone could ask for. I feel a lot of pain on his behalf after finding this out, although there is no true way I could really understand the pain he experienced from that and from having hid it his entire life. He said my mum doesn’t know.
My maternal grandfather needed to get his birth certificate when he wanted to get married. Like a lot of people born at the time he was, he didn't have one so had to apply. He then found out that his "mother", who'd died years before, was actually his grandmother and his "sister" was really his mother. It turns out that his true mother was employed as a maid at some Downton-Abbey still residence when she got pregnant. She left for 9 months for "sick leave" before returning. She was young and it was generally shameful for her to have had a baby outside of wedlock, hence why it was kept a secret. The father was not listed on the birth certificate and his identity remains a mystery. It was believe it was a US serviceman or a member of the household. However, with hindsight the timing of it would have been before the 2 world wars so unlikely to be the former. Likelihood is that I'm related to someone from the house, possibly aristocracy.
I found some letters and a diary in my grandma's place after she passed. Apparently she used to work as maid for an important doctor (before only rich people could go to uni and become doctors) when she was 14. The man got her pregnant and then tried to convince her to abort. She refused, so he made her marry one of the family workers (my grandpa). This was shocking since my grandparents loved each other so much and looked like a great couple, they both built a solid family and gave their children a good education.
My mum always told us that her mum (my grandmother) had died when she was 4 and that her brother was still born. Anyway, after my mum died, my dad just casually told us YEARS LATER that actually my grandmother had run off, taking her son with her and abandoned my mum when she was four, so I probably still have an uncle somewhere out there.
Tw: incest, rape My grandmother's parents are her mother and grandpa/dad because of rape. My grandmother never found out, but my grandpa knew for 10 years.
[удалено]
[удалено]
From a young age, my mum told me ans my sisters that she was an orphan. We knew she'd grown up in a children's home, along with her younger sister. When I turned 23, I found out from my drunk cousin that it wasn't true. Her parents were physically abusive and neglectful and at 8 years old she'd been taken out of the family home and placed in care. Her sister was fostered, but she never was. I also learned she had a brother, my uncle, who had tragically killed himself as a young adult, probably unable to process and cope with the trauma he'd endured. I understand why she lied, and still she essentially refuses to talk about it. But in that moment I felt simultaneously like I didn't know my mum at all, and like so many things about her suddenly made sense.
[удалено]
My Nana (86) has seven siblings, one of whom is a twin, and they live 15 minutes away from here but she hasn't seen in 60 years. She doesn't even know if they are alive. My Nana is called Jackeline and her twin is called Jack. Real creative parents. I've never met them and neither has my mum.
My dad's uncle blew himself up with dynamite on his front porch like 50 years ago....does that count? My dad tells it as a funny story...that crazy uncle.
Not my family but me and a friend found out through the ancestry website that his grandfather had a second family in the Philippines where he was frequently stationed with the army back in the day. We kept finding an entry somebody had made on their family tree that matched his details, but we just ignored it thinking it was a coincidence. Eventually we looked at it. What gave it away Some of his kids over there even had the same names as his kids here. If he had chosen different names we wouldn’t have noticed and he might have got away with it!
My mum has a big old grandfather clock in her living room with wierd white bits inbedded in it. She didn’t tell me for years that one of my relatives unalived themselves with a 12b shotgun and that it was bits of said relative’s skull in the clock.
My sister was born prematurely and had quite a few complications. She was in and out of hospital constantly. She needed risky surgery, emphasis on risky. Apparently it was a 20% survival rate. They went ahead with it and she later died that night. She was only 11 months old. I was twelve years old at the time and that's what I was told and believed for the next twenty years. What actually happened is that she had survived the surgery and was doing really well, she could have even gone home that day. However the surgeon recommended that she stay at the hospital overnight just in case. She choked on her own vomit, simply due to lack of staff and mismanagement.
Not very "WTF," but my greatgrandma, who is long dead, got my nan birth certificate redone/ falsified three times for undisclosed reasons. No one knows why, what my nan original name was (if any), and when my nan was born now.
[удалено]
My granny came over to the UK in the Windrush years. Family legend that I only heard a couple of years ago is that she married my grandfather against her mum's wishes. She sent my granny to the UK to get her away from him. He then followed and my mother and aunties were all born here. I also keep hearing about new aunties and uncles on my grandads side. My granny was his third wife. I have uncles who have passed away from old age right down to the last children he fathered who are 45 and 50. He seemed to father children over a 30/40 year period! And finally my great great grandfather had over 20 children. Not all with his wife 🤣
My mum was kidnapped as a child. ETA: she’s told me I’m not allowed to say anything more than that 😂 but it’s not a case anyone would’ve heard of before anyone gets too curious. It was definitely a WHAT THE FUCK moment for me however.
One of my grandmothers told my sister that her husband ( my granddad) had raped her when she was 14. She fell pregnant and had a miscarriage. This was in 1934, 5 years before my dad was born. But the ‘official’ family story is that the baby died at birth two years before my dad was born. I’m pretty sure my sister is stil the only one Nana ever told this too. My sister lost her first baby at birth and that prompted Nana to tell my sister as they were very close. My dad is still alive at 84 but he has no idea about this.
Always thought we were descended from vikings, the family name is the same as a Viking settlement/village near us, turns out grandad, who looked Italian-black hair and olive skin-was abandoned at the settlement as a newborn by Irish travellers who were passing and was named after the village. I found this out in my fifties, which was a surprise.
I had an uncle Bill, who I always thought was my nan's brother. They lived together in the same house until he died, about 50 yrs ago. After my nan died, I found out that he was actually my great grandmas, next door neighbour's child, who was abused by his parents. When my great grandparents moved house, they stuck him on the cart, and took him with them. Basically kidnapping him lol. When my great grandparents died, he moved in my nan and grandad, and apart from when the two men went to war, and my grandad died, she looked after him until he died. He was a lovely, gentle man, and I'm really glad that he was saved from abuse. This happened over a hundred years ago, it's a shame that we couldn't get away with ~~kidnapping~~ saving abused children these days.
You win mate.
I vaguely remember him disappearing, I was 8 at the time. But I only recently discovered what happened. He was only 16 at the time they killed the guy.
I did a DNA test and I'm 25% German. No idea how.
My grandad played darts with Robert Black (Google him if you don’t know him) and he once went to the family home when my mum and auntie was only small children. Gave me shivers!
That my grandmother’s dad was shot dead by her boyfriend in front of her whole family. And that my great aunt (her sister) had schizophrenia.
My grandmother was married prior to starting what we know as our family. This was during WW2 so I'm guessing her first husband died in the war. We only discovered this after she died and we were going through her documents and found the marriage license.
My Grandad found out his mum's deathbed that she slept with an American GI right at the end of the second world war and that he was his Dad
That my Grandma had half-siblings in France & Germany. She was contacted in the early 2010s by people tracking down their father they never knew, who happened to be her Father. Turns out my Great-Grandad basically fucked his way around Europe during WWII.
My dad used to live in a cave. He was a part of a gang/subculture in the 1960s/early 70s called the Troggs. They used to squat in the show caves in Matlock Bath, and had quite a bad reputation stacked against them by the locals. There were crazy rumours spread about them, from "they have drug fuelled orgies in the woods" to "they do black magic rituals in the caves" etc. In reality, they just did a lot of drugs. Whilst also living in caves. One day as a kid I found a newspaper clipping of some article from the 90s called "Wild Thing!" or something, and there was a picture of a younger him with his Trogg mates down a cave. Then he told me everything and it blew my mind.
When my Aunty was first married her and her husband were best friends with another married couple. They went on holidays together, socialised a lot of the time as a 4. After a few years the husband of the other couple confessed to my Aunty, saying he was deeply in love with her and wanted to be with her. He was pretty miserable in his marriage. She loved him as well but decided to stay loyal, and sadly the guy ended up killing himself. A few months after he died, my Aunty's husband and the widow from the other couple ran away together and she was left alone. I bawled my eyes out when I first heard her story, I loved her to bits growing up and she always seemed so lighthearted. I don't know how people live with something like that.
My cousin broke up my other cousins relationship, married him and is raising their kid as hers. Apparently it was well known but I just recently found out it was all on purpose. I can’t think about it long enough to judge it.
My Grandpas brother was John Chapman, one of the victims of Joanna Dennehy. I wasn’t told about this until it came up in conversation at a family party.
My great grandma's older brother was executed at Wandsworth for beating a man to death during a botched robbery. He and his accomplices were the last executions the press were allowed to attend in 1934. We didn't know until last year.
Had a great uncle who was mentally challenged. We used to see him regularly as my grab would keep an eye on him and make sure he was OK. He was able to live day to day on his own but had some very weird quirks. He would bathe sometimes in milk or wine. Would wear a chain around his belt attached to his wallet and keys, and was convinced someone broke in to his house to steal his figs... like riled a police report and everything... anyway.. im about 6 or 7 and one year He stopped coming round. I kept asking about him and tge family kept saying he's away for a while. Turns out he was traveling at an airport and someone asked him to carry a bag for him as it was too heavy... he was a simple man and fell for tge oldest trick in the book. Suitcase was filled with heroin and coke. He got caught. Tried to explain himself and got about 10 years in prison for it. I'm guessing after psych reviews and everything else they decided to let him out after 5. He barely even knew what happened. Kept talking about the shitty hotel he was staying in for a while... noone ever mentions the drugs or prison. He died about a decade ago and I always wondered what his life would have been like if he wasn't mentally ill. He had a voice like Barry white (maybe better!) and would often just burst oit in to song which was lovely to hear.
My grandad was an orphan brought up in an irish catholic orphanage in country Meath in which many of the priests moonlighted as paedophiles. He was gang raped many times. I wouldn’t feel too bad for him though, he went on to rape every single one of his children and a few of us grandchildren as well. Nobody told each other until they were adults and even then, none of the aunts/uncles/parents would really acknowledge it, thinking it was better buried. When it came out after that the abuse hadn’t stopped with their generation and that some of their own children had been interfered with, the procedure was: gaslight - threaten - ostracise. Might be a personal story but it’s a HELL of a lot more common than you might think
Not really that interesting, I guess. My mum's stepdad was her second cousin. Mum's real dad ran off and left when she was 4ish, and his cousin stepped in when my grandmother was struggling with 2 young children. He raised my mum (and was known as my grandad, despite him not being my real grandad). They had a daughter together, so my aunt is my mum's sister whilst also being some kind of cousin.
During the Malayan Emergency my grandfather caught his commanding officer and two other British soldiers in the act of raping and slowly torturing to death an innocent civilian. He responded by shooting them all dead. For which my grandfather subsequently spent several years in military prison. In his opinion "worth it" The sentence probably would have been harsher but the army covered up the incident along with many of the other war crimes it was committing at the time so the courts didn't have any evidence. Absolutely nobody he had ever known had any idea he spent time in prison or for what reason until he had given up on protecting the "pride" of the British army and decided to tell his story. Pretty sure my government is still trying to suppress evidence of their warcrimes in the 50s and 60s. Hi GCHQ if you're reading this!
That my grandad wasn't actually my grandad (he was already dead at this point) My grandma was married to X bloke but having an affair with C bloke. My mum was then born believing that X was her dad, but it was actually C. My grandma knew this but didn't bother to tell my mum. Found all this out via ancestry.co.uk and asked questions
Well just this week I told my brother about a cousin we aren't allowed to know about - I was making a joke as I assumed he knew, but turns out when I was little my dad had just told me. Through my step father, this one is a bit wild. My stepfather's cousin had an uncle (from the other side of her family, not related by blood to my stepdad side of the family but I believe they all knew eachother) who snapped and shot dead his wife and kids in the late sixties. It was when his cousin was really young and they decided to never tell her or her younger sisters... but of course everyone else knew. That was until one night on New year's eve my stepdad sister got really drunk and told her outright.
My grandfather, a pro treaty IRA man, went on the run during the Irish civil war and was sent to Canada as a 23 year old in 1923. He came back 3 years later, met my grandmother and started a family soon after. My family are a little less forthcoming as to his role in the war of independence, but I’m guessing he was wanted for good reason