Secrets and Lies

My mum always believed that her great uncle was the captain of the Carpathia which was the ship that saved some survivors of the Titanic. After much research into my family tree it turns out that her great uncle along with many other of my mums relatives were boat people. They worked and lived on the canals around Widnes and Warrington.

My paternal grandparents had 8 children. It wasn’t until after they died it came out that they hadn’t been married when their eldest was born in the 1920s. They married two years later. That must have been quite the scandal back then.

We've got things on both sides. A grandfather raised by a foster mum whose mother wasn't married and who we can't trace for certain. An illegitimate great grandmother who was kindly given a father by the vicar who wrote the wedding certificate, and a grandmother we can't find in the 1911 census. She told us a story about what happened to her, but much of what she told us has been proved untrue.

My friends mother married her GI and he went back to the US , she followed him out a few months later.
After about 18 months my friend was born .
Sadly the marriage didn't last and friends mother returned to the uk with her child . Friend doesn't really remember her dad much and they stopped contact when she was still a young girl.
Her mum remarried but never had any other children.
When having your dna done became more popular friend decided to see if she had any family in America .
When the matches came back they were not from a surname she expected.
Turns out her mother ( now passed ) must have had a dalliance whilst married and friend was the outcome.
She doesn't know if that's why the marriage failed nor even if her mother suspected her husband was not the father.

My mum only discovered as an adult that her spinster "aunty" was actually her granny. Her granny was divorced and apparently wouldn't have been employed as a children's nursery worker if they'd known that.

I found from my DNA results that I have far too much Irish DNA, which means my maternal grandmother must have played around during WWI while grandad was away. But of course I found out too late to ask questions.
My mother lied about having breast cancer just after I was born, even my father didn’t know until after she died in her 80s. She had a mastectomy but said it was to do with milk fever when breast feeding me. If I had known I would never have gone on HRT and got breast cancer, which I might have got anyway, but who knows?

RosiesMaw

I think there have been quite a few people who found out in later life that their “teenage older sister” was in fact their mother.
Margaret Forster uses this theme in “Shadow Babies”
When you think about it, so much better than the “erring” pregnant daughter being thrown out to whatever fate awaited her and her baby.

Wasn't Eric Clapton one of those whose older sister was, in fact, his mother?

I think you’d enjoy a BBC podcast called The Gift - it’s about people who were given a DNA. Test as a gift and then find out some family secret .

My birth mother had numerous still births and miscarriages after she’d arranged my adoption before birth.
She told her sisters and sister in laws, that it was because she had given me away.
As it happens, it was because I was a rhesus baby and she lied to drs and hospital staff and didn’t tell them about having an illegitimate first baby.
If she had, then her subsequent heart ache for 7 dead babies, might not have had to happen.

I'm a fairly keen amateur genealogist, but I have been outfoxed by one of my great grandmothers who changed the details on just about every single document she was recorded on as an adult, to the extent that I have been unable to confirm who she actually was. On my grandfather's birth certificate she describes herself as married (no marriage certificate can be found); six months later and pregnant with his sister, she married the man whom DNA says was his father (but was not the man named on the birth certificate) and whose surname my grandfather used, describing herself as a spinster. Her father had the name Frederick on that marriage certificate but John on her (Scottish, where they record such stuff) death certificate. No people fitting the relevant family makeups can be found. Her place of birth varied from Herefordshire to Hampshire on every single census.

The bit of the family she married into was quite posh and my mother said she was full of airs and graces, but her daughter-in-law hated her and thought she was very common!

Hopefully one day DNA will track her down!

I was always under the impression that my mum and dad had got married in February 1946 after a whirlwind romance. Mum was engaged to someone else at the time. A few years ago whilst doing some genealogical research I found out they were both actually married to other people at the time and didn't actually get married until the 1970s. We had absolutely no idea, in fact we even gave them a Silver Wedding Anniversary present when all us kids were in our 20s. Unfortuately by the time we found out it was too late to talk to either of them about it.

I think there have been quite a few people who found out in later life that their “teenage older sister” was in fact their mother.
Margaret Forster uses this theme in “Shadow Babies”
When you think about it, so much better than the “erring” pregnant daughter being thrown out to whatever fate awaited her and her baby.

I have a cousin who became obsessed with ancestry and family trees. She spent years investigating and travel the country finding information.
Years ago she decided to tell all the family about what she had found and hired a village hall and covered the walls with charts of family trees, family information and pictures.
My great grandfather seemed a horrible man a preacher in the local welsh chapel he married three sisters, the first two died very young. My grandmother was born to the middle sister and when she was 14 sent away to work in service in London, 2 years later she came back pregnant. Her father wouldn’t have her and put her in the workhouse where her daughter (my Mums sister) was born. Grandmother’s eldest sister found her 2 years later in the workhouse and took her out to live with her and her new husband.
My poor Mum knew none of this and was devastated it was so publicly shared. Her sister then lived in Canada and she told her only to find out she knew. They were so close and Mum also upset her sister hadn’t told her.
So sad she felt she couldn’t say due to the shame!!

The war ended and out of the blue her husband turned up back home. He threatened my auntie with divorce unless she gave up the child which she promptly did. My gran took on the boy Jack and my auntie went on to have two daughters with her husband. My mum told me it was better my gran took on Jack as her son than my auntie getting a divorce that would be a scandal!

At least Jack stayed within the family. I had a friend whose mum was in a similar situation. When the husband unexpectedly came home, she had her son adopted. He was 4 by then so really settled with his mum, and even though he was in his 50s when I met him, he hadn't really got over being abandoned.

I was a guilty secret for years. After I found out the truth about my background at age 14, it was drummed into me that I must never tell anyone anything about myself.

When we visited our gran we would often be told our cousin Jack would be coming for tea. I remember cousin Jack being a young man and thinking how could he possibly be grans son. he was young enough to be my mums eldest son.

When I was older and gran had died I asked questions apparently my aunties husband was missing assumed dead it was war time. My auntie had heard no more of her husband and was seeing someone else for a few years. The war ended and out of the blue her husband turned up back home. He threatened my auntie with divorce unless she gave up the child which she promptly did.

My gran took on the boy Jack and my auntie went on to have two daughters with her husband. My mum told me it was better my gran took on Jack as her son than my auntie getting a divorce that would be a scandal!

I listened to that podcast, too, Nankate. It was a fascinating story, I couldn't stop listening. Obviously the father - and perhaps even more so the mother - was quite delusional and unstable. I can't stop thinking about the bit about the dirty washing.

You and your cousin Sparklefizz did some good sleuthing.

NannyJ wasn’t it sad how your mum was made to feel ashamed of being brought up by her grandparents. I’m glad those days have gone.

Meryl how sad the one child was not treated the same as the other children.

Thank you all such interesting stories.

A few years ago I was contacted on Ancestry by a woman who I discovered was a niece I knew nothing about. My brother is her Dad and he never knew either. It was the swinging 60s and her Mum never told him as they had split up.

They had a very strained meet up during the pandemic and just text each other now and then. She was 50 when she went on Ancestry so I think too many years had passed. She looks just like him …. Height, colouring, hair etc. and she looks really like my daughter.

I thought this was about the film with the same title starring Brenda Blethyn. excellent film about a mixed race girl who decides to trace her real mother and finds BB who has a couple of adult daughters and doesn’t want to tell anybody that she had a fling with a black guy, had a baby and put her up for adoption.

Great idea for a thread NanKate.

My family has been full of secrets and lies. My cousin and I discovered one big one when we began researching our family history.

We hardly knew our paternal grandparents as our grandfather died when our fathers were only children themselves, and we were only 5 and 6 when our Grandma died.

Our poor grandparents had a tragic time with losses of children. Their first 3 little boys all died of things like Measles and Bronchitis before the age of 3, plus Grandma had several miscarriages which we knew about from things the family had said. She was in her late 30s before she had a child that survived which was really quite old for giving birth in those days.

Anyway, our grandfather was busy. Grrr! He was a reporter on a London newspaper and had a young mistress who we later learnt had been a typist at the newspaper. When Grandma was pregnant, his mistress was also pregnant, and they both gave birth within a month or so of each other.

The mistress went on to have another child with our grandfather, and it seems he had set up a secret home with her on the other side of London ... easier to keep secrets like that back in the early 1920s.

Anyway, in 1924 he became ill and was diagnosed with Leukaemia, and Grandma and the mistress both turned up at his bedside. It sounds more and more like a soap opera.

My cousin and I traced the mistress's son and daughter. The son was killed in WW2, but the mistress and daughter lived with another man (she never married) and they emigrated to Australia and the children live in Victoria. My cousin and I have written to them and swapped photos. The family likenesses are fascinating.

The Aussie half-cousins (not sure if that's the right familial link) said that the mistress was "a bit of a flapper" in the 1920s. She was certainly very pretty in the photo they sent of her aged about 21 with her shingled hair, whereas our Grandma was by then in her 40s and had had repeated pregnancies.

Our grandfather was a real love-rat!!

My husband's sister done her family tree and found out that her maternal grandfather had been married before and possibly had a child by this marriage , he was also a lot older than the family believed by about 15 years. He went away to war in 1914-18 and just didn't return to his home town but a completely different part of the country and married the sister in law of his army chum .

Mum who is now 93, only found out at the age of 5 that her 'sister' was in fact her Mum. A family member told her so she asked her 'Mum' if it was true and was told, yes it was. She told me that once she knew she only wanted her Mum, but Nan's In Laws wouldn't have her live with them, which was who the family were living with.

I am sure this happens in families a lot. Her Mum married when she was 2 and had another 2 children, so Mum was brought up by her Grandparents. She was so ashamed of this, that she never even told me until I was in my 30's.

We only found out after he died that my dad had another brother. My grandad had been married twice but nothing was ever mentioned to us about an uncle. We don't know if my dad ever knew or for some reason this brother was kept secret from him too.

I think most people who do their family history find secrets somewhere down the line. We found out that FiLs uncle was actually his half-brother - we never told him, he wouldn't have believed it. One great-great uncle was a bigamist. One great aunt was jailed as a child for stealing handerchiefs; her brother spent a number of years at a 'technical school' that we found out was actually a reform school, or Borstal.