Family Secrets
Skeletons in The Closet!
Have you ever learned a long lost family secret? Some of them go to the grave with those involved but others surface unexpectedly. As children, probably grown-up secrets are kept hidden but as adults, sometimes we are let into a world we never knew existed. Here are a few I have heard over the years, often from elderly people who wanted someone to talk to.
Kidnapped
This is from many years ago. An elderly lady told me her brother had been in a mixed marriage (that is the partners were different religions). In those days, people could not commute to work as they do now. The husband worked in the city and stayed in "rooms" during the week, going home at the weekend to his wife and child who stayed in a little country town, with her aunt. One week, the wife wasn't very well but the husband still had to go to work, and he left her in the care of her aunt. When he came home at the weekend, he found his wife had died and been buried and the aunt had run off with the child after having her baptised into the aunt's religion. The child was never found. The man died in World WarII.
Love Child
An elderly lady died and on the day of her funeral, her three adult children met their elder brother for the first time. They had always known this man, he had often visited their house but they had never known that he was their elder brother.
An elderly man lived with his mother and ran a shop. He had been married but his wife had left him, gossip had it that the mother kept trying to run his life and his wife couldn't stick it. When he died, an unknown man turned up at the funeral - his son. It turned out that the elderly man had fathered a love child in Germany during or just after WWII and had kept in touch with the mother. It was for this reason that his wife had left him.
Baby Death
A girl in school said she was the eldest child in the family but another girl told her that she had had an elder brother who had died. The girl went home to ask her parents and learned a very sad story. Her mother had had a little boy and when she came home from the hospital put the baby upstairs in the crib. While she was downstairs, the next door child of four years old came into their house and picked the new baby up, thinking he was a doll but carried him downstairs by one foot. He sat on the outside doorstep nursing his "doll" until it was realised what had happened. That child's family moved away but I wonder if that boy was ever told of what happened?
Do you know of any old secrets?
Image Credit » http://pixabay.com/en/censorship-limitations-610101/ by stevepb
Comments
luisga814 wrote on April 20, 2015, 1:52 AM
Yes, I do have family secrets. My great grandfather has three wives. One in Northern Luzon, one in Central Luzon and one in Central Mindanao. All of that are provinces in the Philippines.
peachpurple wrote on April 20, 2015, 2:44 AM
wow, the 4 year old dragged the baby foot from upstairs to downstairs? Brain damaged by the time the baby is downstairs. Horrible secrets!
bestwriter wrote on April 20, 2015, 3:10 AM
There must be countless such tales but if they are from our own kith and kin or in our neighbourhood I suppose that would have some weight. My sis-in-law - one of her brothers was illegitimate and this we came to know years later. Fortunately her mother did not live that long to be embarrassed.
motrojam wrote on April 20, 2015, 6:23 AM
I find those kinds of secrets creepy especially the last one.
allen0187 wrote on April 20, 2015, 6:44 AM
Wow! Those are some crazy family secrets! The one involving the baby and the child is kinda creepy. I do not know of any family secrets and I do hope we don't have any!
maxeen wrote on April 20, 2015, 7:16 AM
I know my cousin isn't my cousin but that is pretty common. The story of the baby being dragged downstairs is just horrific.
LeaPea2417 wrote on April 20, 2015, 9:35 AM
There is a story that is deep and dark that one of my distant uncles molested his daughter around 1970, but, it is odd, his wife (my distant aunt) never believed the story. They are both still alive today and still married. The daughter is an adult , married and has two grown kids. I guess, it was an ugly rumor.
MegL wrote on April 20, 2015, 11:14 AM
Not necessarily, some of these stories take a while to surface.
rosepetal wrote on April 20, 2015, 12:04 PM
Yes, I happened upon one family secret that was divulged to me by my mom when I was an adult.
iwrite28 wrote on April 21, 2015, 1:37 PM
Oh yes! My family is replete with those secrets -- which become "stories" after a while :)
msiduri wrote on April 22, 2015, 9:29 AM
Every family has secrets like this. People are people. The one about the child dragging the baby is just.. horrible. I can't imagine how the respective parents dealt with that.
Shellyann36 wrote on April 25, 2015, 5:10 PM
There are quite a few real secrets in my family tree on my mother's side of the family. An uncle that was a child molester and tried to molest my mama and her sisters. The same uncle is said to have sold his soul to the devil in order to do some sort of voo doo magic? I am not really sure if that is true or not but they seemed to think he could do some strange things.
scheng1 wrote on April 27, 2015, 8:09 AM
All these are very scary. I really hope that it is fiction instead of truth.
Kasman wrote on May 4, 2015, 5:11 PM
On the death of our mother (20 years ago) I learned that my elder brother had been conceived before our parents were married. This was back in 1939 and such a thing was a scandal then! As a late baby I had always assumed that I was a mistake but it turns out that the mistake was my brother!
WritingLover wrote on May 8, 2015, 5:38 PM
We had one big family secret a few years back, thankfully that has been all....so far!
HappyLady wrote on May 10, 2015, 1:23 AM
I will never know what my Nan did. She was bound by the official secrets act. Her friend across the road she used to travel to London with told me just before she died that she also worked for MI5. Of course, they were probably just secretaries and knew very little! (Not the Nan who was a dancer and actress I have written about.) I also had a Grandfather I met in my twenties. Nobody told me much about him and I was the one who found, after the family had no idea what happened to him where my Great Grandfather had lived and what he did after disappearing.
VinceSummers wrote on May 27, 2015, 12:42 PM
Some secrets are horror stories. Some are scandalous. Some are fun. I've seen all varieties in my researches.
jiangliu1949 wrote on May 29, 2015, 8:11 AM
It takes all sorts to make a world .They are unheard -of fantastic stories and You might as well work up them into novels .
MegL wrote on May 29, 2015, 9:21 AM
Yes, that's probably a good idea
paigea wrote on May 31, 2015, 3:15 PM
Wow, some of those are horrendous. I can't think of any secrets other than a cousin of my grandma's who lived with a woman and never married. I guess the rest of the family tried to keep that a secret.
Paulie wrote on June 2, 2015, 11:00 PM
I will never forget the time that my uncle revealed a secret about my dad about 3-4 years before both of them passed away. My dad was so embarrassed when Uncle Dick talked about my dad breaking into a gas station when he was about 15 years old.