Every household has its own family tales that are passed upon generations. Stories that only the family members must know and keep to themselves until the end. However, sometimes, there are members of the family who are exempted from the secret.
They say it’s a natural thing for a family to have hidden skeletons that they will protect at all costs. Regardless of its reason, a secret must remain a secret.
1. Small Thing Nowadays
My grandfather was a Postal Inspector (essentially a cop who investigated postal crimes) in LA in the 50s. I found several stories on Newspapers.com on the front page of the Los Angeles Times about arrests he made.
Things like stealing letters out of the mailboxes are totally minor stuff that wouldn't even be noted in a local paper today.
They not only described the crime and suspect in detail, but they also printed the suspect's full home address. It was a different time, apparently.
Jumpy_monkey
2. True Blood
My sister and I found out in our mid/late 20s that we had a full-on brother. Our dad got our mom pregnant in high school, and because it was the '60s, it was all hush-hush. And she went to do her senior year “with family” and just quietly came back to town.
They ended up getting together for real in college, and no one knew - not their lifelong friends or even my uncle.
Our brother had a good childhood with his adoptive family, but he was always curious about his birth mother, so he wrote her a letter.
He sure was surprised to also come to meet his dad and two sisters. The crazy thing is he didn’t live too far away, and we all look extremely alike. It would have been weird if we'd bumped into each other otherwise.
LazyLeslieKnope
3. The Boss
When I was around five years old, I had a birthday party. So a "friend" of my father came and asked me what I wanted for a birthday gift.
I told him I wanted a racetrack with cars. He snapped his fingers, and another man who was with him left. He came back 30 minutes later with a $1000 set.
My parents forced me to give it back. I found out later on that the man was a recruiter for the mafia, and they were trying to get my father to join/do some things.
Mrnix
4. The Realest
I was born in the United States, and my parents are both immigrants. After a ton of research, I found out that my grandfather was one of the most important political people working in the background of my parent's native country.
He personally knew movie stars and amassed an incredible wealth that I haven't even told my aunts and uncles about (all 9 of them) because they would just fight over it like everything else.
I've been hiding this secret from my family. Only my grandmother knows it. My grandfather was also my best friend; we were alike in every way, and I didn't want my family to fight over something like this.
Amelinbabi
5. Karma Hits
In the 90s, my aunt got married to this trashy, pothead dude. Had the baby, and within three months was pregnant again. She decided she could handle being the single mother of one kid, but not two.
My aunt and grandmother kept the second pregnancy secret from everyone. Gave the second child, a daughter, up for adoption. My grandma told my dad his sister “had a tumor removed.”
The son is now a loser who has basically never had a job. His full-blood sister, virtually identical, was adopted by a lovely family in a nearby city.
She graduated from university and has a professional career. She found us via social media and is tentatively building a relationship with the family.
ZweitenMal
6. Still Happy Family
I always looked up to my dad, who never drank or smoked, raised his voice, or swore. My dad was generally very laid-back, and it was easy to smile or offer a kind word. He was a devoted father and an extremely hard-working man, sometimes working up to three jobs to support us.
So I was very let down when I found out, as an adult, that he cheated on my mom when he went abroad for a year to work. My sister and I were toddlers, and my mother was understandably heartbroken.
The fact that growing up, my mother was authoritarian, and my dad, the laid-back one, always made it so that we clashed.
But now, as an adult, I find myself seeing things from my mother’s perspective more and more, and I realize she was an extremely patient and forgiving woman. My mom never told us this about my dad in order to preserve our image of him.
LiminalSpaceG
7. A Big Family Tree
My great-grandfather had a secret second family. He had nine kids with his legal wife (my great-grandmother) and then had several other kids with his girlfriend, who lived in the next town over.
The girlfriend was Indigenous, making this extra scandalous. My grandmother found out about this late in life, decades after her father died when one of these half-siblings confronted her.
My grandmother became despondent over this, refused to acknowledge her half-siblings, and no one in the family would talk about it.
Freshfruitrottingveg
8. The Right Choice
My parents got divorced when I was about three years old. I stayed in contact with my mother, but my father got full custody, as my mom apparently relinquished custody because of her financial situation.
She claimed she made the difficult decision of giving custody to my dad for the sake of us kids because he could provide a better life for us. "The most difficult sacrifice she ever made."
On several occasions, my mother would also get drunk and lament her life and say something to the effect of, "I never should've left your father. He was a good guy. He didn't deserve that. We would've been happy."
I had heard variations on it a bunch of times, so one day, I decided to share it with my dad. I was in my mid-20s at that point. My dad, who at no point in my life ever discussed the divorce or my mom, replied, "She said that?”
Dad added, “I left her because of her alcoholism and other misbehaviors and how she was always drunk during the pregnancy and while you were little. Kids deserve a safe home to grow up in."
I later got that verified from my maternal grandmother. Apparently, everyone knew but never bothered to tell me that my dad was the one who left Mom because she was a bad person.
She didn't have to "make the difficult sacrifice of giving dad custody because he could provide a better life for us," the court straight up gave dad custody after a court battle where my mom was deemed unfit to be a parent because of said substance use.
For about 20 years, I'd thought my dad got dumped by my mom, but it turns out he was just a really good parent and made the right choice for us kids.
SendMeNudesThough
9. Same Behavior
When my parents got married it was because my mom got pregnant with my brother. (That’s not the secret; everybody has always known it.) Mom’s parents practically kicked her out of the house.
My dad had already left for the Air Force (he had to fly back for a quickie wedding after basic). This was the early 1960s, so it was still a bit scandalous. Mom ended up moving in with her new in-laws so she could finish her last year of college before joining my dad in Texas and later Japan.
20- some years later, everyone was preparing for my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. (Mom's parents, the ones who kicked her out for getting pregnant without being married).
My grandma got really upset and said, we can’t celebrate 50, we’ve only been married 49 years. This was a shock to everyone because my mom’s oldest brother was 50.
Turns out that if they had gotten married, my grandpa would have been kicked out of high school, so they hid the pregnancy/baby until he graduated. After enough time had passed, they just told everyone the earlier date.
Even though they did the exact same thing, they couldn’t bring themselves to show any sympathy for their own daughter in that situation.
Young-Grandpa
10. Another Person
My defacto uncle (he and my aunt never married but have been together since well before I was born, with a few hiccups) has a child with another woman.
It became common knowledge when the girl was six and was starting to understand the situation. At first, it was a bit scandalous, but she's been welcomed with open arms by my entire family, including her half-siblings' maternal grandparents.
She's treated the same as all the other kids her age. Her half-sister (my cousin) has a daughter the same age, and they're best friends.
They go to the same high school and are totally inseparable, technically aunt and niece, haha. She comes to all our family events and is an awesome kid. We're all stoked to have her in our family!
Interesting-Long-923
11. Mommy’s Hidden Mystery
Both bio and raised me dads had been dead 20 years when I found out. My mom, per her personality, just shrugged and admitted it once I knew for sure (I connected with a second cousin at 23 who helped me narrow down who my father was).
It didn't really change anything for us. It was already a strained relationship. I found out a couple of weeks before COVID-19, so not seeing my mom for the next couple of years wasn't a big deal, we still talked on the phone.
I ended up meeting some cousins and bio dad's brother. That's been cool. I'm 4 inches taller and traditionally better looking than my (half) siblings I grew up with, so I guess thanks, Mom, for the more attractive DNA.
TrippleDubbs
12. The Two Girls
The story was always that my two cousins were adopted and not related to each other; even people sometimes would ask them if they were twins. They would say, "Nope, we're adopted."
Somehow, it got out that their bio mom was their younger aunt. The older sister adopted and raised both girls as her own.
Younger aunt/mom got married and started a family before all this came out, too. It was a wild journey.
I have heard this is common in Catholic families. They hide the illegitimate pregnancy, and someone in the family adopts the child or pretends it is an older married family member's child. This was in the early 80s, so I guess it was possible to get away with it.
Thrax_mador
13. The Project Changed Everything
In 8th grade, I had to do a family tree, which required that I call my grandparents, who were 1,200 miles away, to ask them about their parents.
I got to have two great-grandparents, but I didn’t know much about the others. My grandmother told me that the man we all thought to be her dad was actually her stepfather.
My dad and his siblings didn’t even know. She was conceived illegitimately, and when her biological father found out, he moved to another state and got married. She never met him. She was born in 1928, and this conception and being fatherless was shameful.
Alert_Marketing_8688
14. Two Sets
After he died, we found out my grandpa had an entire other family. He had married and fathered children but had to keep going on "military leave," which is what he called living with my grandmother in a different state.
He eventually left the first family entirely. (This was in the late 40s or early 50s.) After he died in the late 80s, the first family contacted us and said they'd known about us this whole time and had been keeping tabs.
I was only two at the time, but apparently, it was pretty wild. My mother has a ton of siblings because of it. My go-to response when she says she has something exciting to tell me is, "What, did you find another secret family member?'
SeguroMacks
15. The Family Trouble
The reason my dad joined the military was not because he was the oldest kid in a large family who wanted to get out and finance a college education.
He joined the military as part of a plea deal. He got arrested as the getaway driver for an armed robbery. He was only 17 at the time.
A deal was worked out that he, too, was to plead guilty and serve a few months in jail, and then when he turned 18, he would join the military.
I also found out recently that the prison my dad served time in was the family prison. A handful of his cousins also served time there, and they had sentences that overlapped, so they’d meet up in jail.
At least one of them had been unaware that the others were in jail because he’d been told that they had gone away to college. Imagine his surprise when he had a family reunion.
Jessipowers
16. Messy Environment
When I was a kid, my Dad spent time in prison. I didn't find out why until he was arrested again. He was caught with CSAM on the work computer of the business he shared with his friend and got taken down, but he blamed his friend and got a reduced sentence.
The second time it was because he was basically running his own To Catch a Predator sting. He was going into chatrooms pretending to be a teenage girl.
He was sending ransomware to people who interacted with him and blackmailing them to fund his trips to Thailand. One of the people caught in his sting went to the police and got a few years in prison.
And it turned out my father had CSAM on his computer again anyway. I also found out more recently (and less horrifyingly) that my mom was adopted when she was a kid.
She talked to her biological father a few times when I was a baby and tried to get in touch with her mom, but she wanted nothing to do with it. She's now in contact with her older half-sister, but they haven't met in person.
Video-kid
17. Double Celebration
I was born on my parent's first anniversary. I always thought that it was a cool coincidence, and I'd never forget their anniversary. On my 18th birthday, we had some family over for a joint party.
I said Happy 19th anniversary to my folks. My sister (10 years older & different dad) said, "Mom, when will you tell him the truth?" I looked at Mom, and she just kind of looked down at the ground.
Then my sister told me that my parents got married on my 1st birthday. I asked my mom if it was true, and she said yes. I asked her, “Why didn't you tell me this before?"
She said that I had always just assumed that I was born on their anniversary and never corrected me. Now it's a funny little thing that my sister gives me crap about on my birthday.
Randumb9999
18. In Loving Memory
My maternal grandmother was very well known in a community in California. She basically started soccer programs in the town when they were first started.
She died in a car accident with her best friend. They crashed into a haystack truck. My grandma left behind four children. I think her best friend went behind 5.
There’s a soccer field named after her with a plaque describing how much she meant to the community. One Thanksgiving my Grandpa and grandma(his next wife) told me that my grandpa knew the first officer on the scene personally, and he called him up immediately.
Before anyone else got there, they removed the alcohol bottles out of the car before anyone else could see. Nobody from the other family knows they were drunk when they died.
Helloimanonymoose
19. Bad Idea
My mom might not actually be my biological mother. I’m a surrogate baby and was told my entire life even though my mom didn’t birth me, I am 100% biologically my parent's kid.
Well, I’ve wanted to get one of those 23 and me things done cause I thought learning more about my family could be cool, but my mom was SUPER against it.
Anyway, I was out grabbing a drink with my dad a few weeks ago, and I was like, “Hey, btw, why is mom so weird about me getting a 23 and my test??”
And he explained that actually, donor eggs were in the mix because my mom's eggs weren’t taken, so there’s about a 50/50 chance I am NOT, in fact, biologically related to my mom, and my mom's a bit freaked about me finding out.
I don’t actually care. My mom is my mom 100%. I’m just curious about my genealogy. I also wanna have kids eventually and would very much like to know if there’s anything I should be looking out for.
It's not a super dramatic thing (I mean, I guess it is to my mom, but not to me). I’m not traumatized by this, and actually, it kinda makes sense cause I look exactly like my dad.
But the few features that aren’t my dad's aren’t my mom's either. I don’t look like her side of the family at all. The only thing my mom and I have in common is that we’re both blonde, but my dad is also blonde so.
Houseofreturn
20. Not Clueless
We found out after my grandpa died that he had another kid with a woman he met before my grandma. Idk if he ever knew he had a kid.
The offspring showed up on one of those ancestry gene websites and said he was open to meeting family, so some of the older cousins went out hunting with him.
All this was spilled to me at my cousin's wedding two years ago, and I guess people in the family had known for a few years. My parents never told me, and they still don’t know that I know.
Sparklelincoln
21. Still Living
I was always told that my mother’s father had “died in the war.” After my mother died, my cousins found out that our grandfather was actually alive and had divorced my grandmother when my mom was young.
My grandmother, being a good Irish Catholic, told the nuns at the school that she was a widow because the church wouldn’t let a divorced woman’s kids go to Catholic school.
My grandfather had remarried and had a whole other set of kids and grandchildren. My cousins tried to meet him, but he wasn’t interested.
Johnny_B_Asshole
22. Siblings Mystery
This just came out about a month ago when my sister did a 23 and me. My grandfather on my mother's side was supposedly born and raised on the reservation, 100% native american.
Well, my sister did a 23 and me a while back, and it had 0% native american in her results. She started doing a little digging and found out our grandfather was not only born someplace completely different than he said but also ten years earlier.
This has left my family completely confused because neither my grandfather nor grandmother are here to sort this out any longer or explain why this dude shaved ten whole years off of his life and lied about being raised on the reservation.
He also had very native american features, some of which I've inherited, which also leaves me wondering a bit. I did ask my mom (jokingly) if she brought the wrong baby home from the hospital when she brought my sister home, but she insists that is not the case. lol
SweetCosmicPope
23. Different Affairs
I found it and spilled it! It doesn't affect anything other than family history, though. Let's call my dad's family name LittleFly. It's the approximate English translation.
I was researching the LittleFly family history on Heritage. I knew we came from France, but that was it. I followed back with no problem until the early 1800's. Then, I found an anomaly.
There was a man and woman who had children together. The man's last name was Bell (made up, can't remember), and the woman's name was LittleFly. Half the kids had the LittleFly last name, and half had the Bell last name. What?
It turns out that Mr Bell was married to a completely different woman. They had no children together. Mr. Bell and Ms LittleFly had like 5 or 6 kids together while the Bells were still married.
From what I can tell, Ms LittleFly lived in the same house as the Bells. This wasn't a wealthy family, either. The best I could figure, they gathered reeds from the swamp for fires.
Mr. Bell may also have worked on the ferries. I'm not sure. It's all in French, I'm not French, and my Heritage subscription has run out. So! Our family was born of an affair! I now don't know if I should follow the Bell line or the LittleFly line.
Cindyscrazy
24. Unreasonable Secret
I have a family member who recently died, whose name was dumbo. That's what everyone called him.
And I mean, they love talking about him so much that they will stand up in church and speak loudly and proudly about it. Schools, town halls, restaurants. Everyone hated our family.
They will tell literally everyone who will listen about this guy. Well, it turns out that his legal name was Thomas. My family doesn't have a drop of blood that isn't Scandinavian in it.
My family was angry at me for refusing to even consider applying for those same scholarships that I probably could have gotten, considering my family history. It's been a pretty big rift between the logical part of my family and the irrational part of my family.
DewinterCor
25. You Asked For It
I came home from my first semester at university and told my mom on the way to Sam Goody that all of the people I'd recently met had really interesting family stories and skeletons in their closets and that we were boring because we had none.
My mother, who grew up in the rural Southern US and was raised Catholic - who later married my Southern Baptist father - told me that if I wanted skeletons, she had a doozy for me.
I thought I was the youngest of the two of my mother's children - I thought I only had an older brother. It turns out that, in rural NC, in the late 1950s, she became pregnant.
Her boyfriend, Paul, wanted her to give up the child and offered to pay for it. I shudder to think about what that procedure would look like in that place and time.
She was sent to a home in Ohio for unwed mothers. Only her mother, her aunt, and her best friend knew why she went away. She gave birth to a daughter, Paula, whom she held for a few minutes before the baby was whisked away.
She has never tried to find her firstborn, the older sister I had, and remains unsure how she'd react if her daughter reached out to her. My mother turned 80 late last year.
Forgotten-Sparrow
26. Letting go
My family is from Korea. Prior to the 80s, it was a poor country. My grandmother, at the time, was married to my grandfather, a Naval officer, and due to his meager salary, she had to go to Seoul to find work.
At that time - in the late 60s or early 70s - not many homeowners were willing to rent to a mother and three boys, so she made the extremely difficult decision to leave my father, the middle child, with his grandparents at age 4.
My grandmother cried on the phone with me as she recalled how someone else told her about her boy - just four years old - standing in a field of barley as tall as he was, staring out into the sunset.
It breaks my heart just typing this. He must have been so afraid and scared. He didn't have the words for this until just three years ago from now - he asked her, “Why did you abandon me?”
The other big one is that this same grandfather, at some point, went to prison. I have fewer details about this. It wasn't criminal - it sounded like a business deal gone wrong - but another big one I only found out about this last week.
spamchow
27. Opened Box of Memory
Had a Veteran's Day project in school in the 4th grade. My mom told me that I could have a look at this box in the garage with my dad's old uniform in it.
While I was looking through it, I found a marriage certificate for some lady. Asked my dad about it at the dinner table, and it turns out he got married.
He was 20 to some woman who cheated on him, so he got a divorce a couple of years later. During that marriage, his best friend, who he got drafted at the same time as him, died.
This opened up a pandora's box of memories for my dad that he had kept closed for over a decade, and it caused him to go into deep sadness immediately that has lasted for decades.
My dad has since had a couple of long discussions with me about his early life, being drafted, escorting his best friend's body to the funeral, and presenting the coffin and flag to his best friend's parents.
Pretty deep, and the beginning of a horrible time in our family since opening those doors really crushed my father, who, up until that point, was a pretty well-adjusted, if not overly strict, guy.
Farkwadian
28. Twisted Relationships
A former coworker of mine told me this story. It really, really screwed with his head. It's kind of a reverse scenario of a sibling turning out to be a parent.
When he was born, his parents were a lot older than most parents normally are. They are a lot older, like in their late 50s.
They ultimately decided that they just weren't up to the task of being parents all over again, but they didn't have the heart to give him up for adoption, so they just gave him to one of his sisters, and she raised him as her son.
It wasn't until he was an adult that he learned that his mom was actually his sister, his aunts, and uncles were actually his siblings, and his grandparents were actually his parents.
Jacobr1020
29. Granny’s Shenanigans
Cleaning out my grandmother’s house after she passed recently. As far as we knew, including my dad and uncle, grandma never dated anyone after my grandfather passed away nearly 40 years ago.
I came to find out that Grandma used to go on cruises with her best friend, who spilled the beans. She and Grandma went on cruises and picked up men.
For about 25 years, Grandma and her best friend went on 2-3 cruises a year. She said that most of the time, they were with different men each night.
So, grandma was a hoochie after my grandfather died. When her best friend broke this news, my dad and uncle looked at each other and absolutely died laughing.
SomeHungGuy69
30. The Gardener
My great grandparent's last gardener was actually their biological grandson (they weren't aware of this). He was the result of an extramarital affair with my great uncle... who recommended him as the gardener.
My great-grandparents were older already, and we have no idea if they ever guessed or not, but the gardener was the spitting image of my great-uncle.
My siblings and I were children at the time, and my dad and uncles referred to him as "the bastard," so I can't imagine my great-grandfather wasn't aware of this.
The gardener's first name was a centuries-old traditional family name as well. After my great-grandparents died, my great-uncle set the gardener up with an inheritance, and his wife almost divorced him, lol.
IcyIndependent4852
31. Double life
My dad found out his dad was not his dad about 30 years after he passed and about 5ish years after his mother passed. His mother had a lot of issues, to say the least, so it was never surprising she took it to the grave.
But he found out through a standard DNA test like ancestory.com that his father is a now relatively prominent doctor who we have theorized “donated” his specimen to her back in the late 60s while we thought his real father was being treated at the same department at the time while this doctor was there.
There are pictures of this guy on the hospital website, and my dad is the spitting image of him, which is absolutely undeniable.
My dad has a lot of internal struggles based on a difficult childhood with at least one parent with a pretty severe personality disorder, so he has not yet chosen to reach out to this man, but yeah, it’s been heavy.
smdfg15
32. Bone Marrow Test
After my grandmother got diagnosed with blood cancer, my mom wanted everyone to get bone marrow tested to donate. My grandmother threw a fit, and my mom demanded that I know why.
She admitted my grandparents’ oldest wasn’t my grandpas, and he was fully aware, but my aunt was not. Then, after my grandpa died, my mom did ancestry.com and found out she wasn’t either.
We don’t know if they knew that one bc they were both gone by then. But OOF. My mom found her bio dad online, and then he died, too, and we never really got a story of what happened. The mystery lives on.
Willing-Book-4188
33. Heartless Auntie
The fundie great-aunt who tried to trick my dementia-ridden grandmother into signing their mother’s house over had a kid when she was 16 that she gave up for adoption.
Found out when my aunt took a DNA test online. Said aunt technologically slammed the door in her granddaughter’s face (she took the test) when she reached out.
Any tea or clarification is gone with the rest of my grandma’s memories. The SOLE bit of tea we got is my grandpa remembering when she was “sent away in high school to the farm.”
According to him, “Some girls just did that.” No sense of irony. He legitimately thinks this grand-niece is lying and that auntie fundie never was pregnant. She just “went away for a while.”
EugeniasNemesis
34. So Close
My Great-Great Grandmother (single) came over from Germany after WWI and had a kid two months later. She met a guy and “worked” for him for about a decade, mysteriously having two more kids during that time.
Eventually, she got married, moved away, and left the kids with the man. She eventually had my Great-grandfather, and he grew up without knowing anything about his half-siblings.
That was until about 70 years later when one of their daughters sent a letter to my grandma explaining their relationship. They promptly met up and realized they had only been living about 20 miles from each other, and the relationship rekindled from there.
They even came to my Grandpa’s funeral in 99, where it was revealed that some of the family actually did know about them all along. When people asked how they were related, the older family members would refuse to elaborate and would brush them off.
My father, however, would make sure to tell the story to everyone who asked and made sure these older family members could hear it all.
Ghidorahnumber1
35. The War
My Grandfather was an English and Russian-speaking citizen of Germany during WW2. He said he 'fixed planes'. I later found out that he was Paperclipped into Canada (technically Matchboxed when it's Canada) and actually worked on a lot of the early rocket programs before becoming a farmer.
We've only been able to find a few people with our last name in historical documents or currently living. In history, one man with my last name was executed for war crimes (scuttling U-boats at the end of the war).
The other people with my very German last name live in Argentina. So, while I can't piece a lot together of what actually happened, it seems the branches of my family trees are shaped like swastikas.
Twice_Knightley
36. I am a Secret
I am actually the dark family secret. All of my brothers and sisters know, but they don't know that I do. They've kept the secret from everyone except one person, and that person told me.
My mother had a secret affair that resulted in pregnancy, and my father raised me like I was his own. I sometimes contemplate whether to tell my sons, but I probably won't.
I actually recalled having met the other father when I was really young, but not since, and not interested in meeting him now. Both of my parents have passed, so I'm not going to make any issues out of it.
Grimacepug
37. Forced Decision
My mother was sent to an unwed mother’s home to have her first child. In Australia, this was very commonplace even as late as the 70s.
This is referred to as forced Adoption, as the mother never had a chance to even try to keep their child. It was common practice for families to send their pregnant, unwed daughters to these places to complete their pregnancy and give the child away without “The neighbors knowing.”
On top of that, she has since found out through ancestry DNA that her father wasn’t her father, and her mother was pregnant with her to another man before her parents were married. Talk about hypocrisy.
Travis_C
38. The Other Side
My great-grandmother was a maid to a wealthy family. When the man died, she took my grandmother to the funeral and said take a good look. That man was your father.
There had been a bit of a scandal because he bought her a house when she was pregnant but never claimed her as his own. She inherited nothing when he died.
Her half-brother became a US senator, and she never met him. My great-grandmother quickly married, and my grandmother had his (the guy my grandmother married) name on her birth certificate.
I always wondered why my mother kept us away from her grandfather's side of the family. They were all over the town I grew up in. Turned out it was because she knew we were not actually related to them.
DanLewisFW
39. Not The Father
My elder sister, by ten years, had a father who was different from my mother's previous marriage. My parents decided, in all their brilliance, that they would only tell her the truth on her wedding day.
Like there's nothing else on your mind that day, right? Does it make sense to tell your kid that you're not the father and won't walk her down the aisle? Jesus Christ. She was his damn kid, and he was involved in raising her since she was four years old.
They let her grow up for decades of her life, wondering why I was the only grandchild who got Christmas or birthday gifts from my dad's parents. She cried herself to sleep at night for years, wondering why our grandparents didn't love her.
She ended up finding out after a friend of hers once got drunk and shouted, "At least I know who my father is!" My sister confronted our parents about that, who then unceremoniously told her the truth.
I don't understand how people can be so cruel, and I've been in contact with those parents for years. For many reasons. But I'm happy that my sister is doing well now.
She got married a few years ago in a small ceremony in Las Vegas, and our parents weren't invited. I feel genuine schädenfreude about how offended our parents still are about that to this day.
NeedlesslySwanky
40. Grandma’s Truth
I always knew my paternal grandparents were married shotgun style. My grandmother found herself pregnant out of wedlock, which wasn't acceptable in her small-town Catholic community.
My dad's older sister had to spend her first two months living with the nuns so she could look "acceptable" coming home nine months after the wedding.
I found out separately (from my stepfather's mother, who knew my dad's family at that time) that my grandfather wasn't even my aunt's father. He was just the first guy who was willing to be seduced and take responsibility for a kid he thought was his.
CaptainTime5556
41. The DNA Kit
My dad from Germany moved here with his mother when he was about 16. He was raised by his mother and never knew his father. We never really talked about why he didn’t know his dad; he was just never around Germany when he and his mother lived there.
Flash forward to Christmas when I’m 28 years old, and I get an ancestry DNA kit. Cool! My dad always said he was 100% German, but I was interested to see what my mom’s side was.
I get the test back, and I am gobsmacked. I was more than 25% Jewish. I was so confused! I went to my mom and dad and was like, “Uh, I think this is wrong?” And my mom and dad both kinda look at each other and then back at me.
Apparently, my dad’s dad was Jewish & he has always known this. His mother also knew the father was Jewish (and her mother forbade her from ever seeing him again).
lildragonxx
42. Found Her Way
My mother had a baby before she met my father. That baby was given up for adoption at birth. My mother knew her baby was a girl, but nothing more. That happened in 1948.
In 1974, that daughter found our family. Unfortunately, my mom passed away in 1971, so they never met. But at the time she made contact, there were only three people who even knew of this woman’s existence.
My stepmother tried to tell my younger siblings that this was her relative, but one of my sisters never bought it. She actually called me to ask if this was really my stepmother's cousin or our sister.
I remember calling my dad to say that I thought lying was a very bad idea. I told him I’d be willing to tell my siblings who Anne really was. He realized the cat was out of the bag already and told them the truth.
The reason it didn’t fly was twofold. First, she and I looked a lot alike, and when she came to visit, she asked a lot of questions about our mom, which would have been odd for my stepmother's relative.
awakeagain2
43. The Older Sister
My grandmother never knew she was adopted growing up, and I learned she was adopted much later in life. None of us really ever knew who her actual mother was because she was never brought up, and she never had any reason to doubt her adoptive mother as anything but her mother.
She learned even later in life from her mother and her sister that she was, in fact, adopted by her grandmother, and my grandmother's much older sister she grew up with was her mother.
Basically, her sister was too young to care for a child when she had her, and she was raised by her grandmother as her daughter until around her 60s when it was revealed that her sister was her mother. I don't know if I can explain it very well,, but I was shocked when I learned.
T1NF01L
44. There’s More
It’s not fully out there, but it turns out my uncle is only my half-uncle. For as long as I can remember, my family has joked about how my uncle must be someone else’s kid because he looks so different from his siblings.
Keep in mind that these jokes were made in front of my grandparents. Well, a few years after my grandmother died, my uncle did one of those DNA test kits, and the results came back with someone else as his dad.
So he tracked the guy down, which wasn’t hard because he was their neighbor and still lives in the same house. Apparently, he always suspected my uncle was his kid because he and his wife were swingers with my grandparents (apparently) at the time he was conceived.
Now, the final question we have is whether my grandfather knows my uncle isn’t his or not. If the neighbor's story is true, he has to know it’s a possibility, but frankly, all of us are too afraid to ask.
Through this adventure, I also found out that my grandmother's parents were swingers and that her mom wasn’t exactly sure who her dad was either.
Dobbys_Other_Sock
45. Dad’s Real Family
When we went to Italy, my father always went to visit this Arab family. I went a few times. He explicitly told me to never tell my mother.
Turns out, that was his dad's family. His actual dad was Egyptian. He told my mother that his 'dead father' was Italian because he thought my mother wouldn't date him if she thought he wasn't full-blooded Italian.
My sister eventually revealed the secret. My mother was shocked but just accepted it. We are now pretty close with that side of the family, and some of them have moved to New York, so we see them often.
frogvscrab