Whais the most shocking thing you learned when researching your family history?

[reecejackox]

The most shocking thing I learned was that my great great grandfather was jailed for robbery.

 

[Turn the Page]

When I was about 10 or so I learned one of my uncles sexually abused one of my aunts when she was about 13. Unfortunately that particular uncle was my grandmothers favorite so the situation was handled by sending my aunt to live with my greatgrandmother until the uncle in question went to college.

We never had anything to do with that uncle and that answered the question as to why.

 

[Bilberry]

Hmmm.... I guess I can think of a few. There were a couple incidences involving doctors. The one that sticks out the most this morning concerns a husband and wife who were both physicians. The husband believed his wife was having an affair with one of her patients. The husband goes to confront the patient at his home. Feeling threatened for his life, the patient shots the husband doctor dead. The incident made national news in its day, 75 years ago or about.

 

[janicept]

Not really research but I was 15 when my Dad told me that my Grandmother had remarried, he was adopted, and that my Grandfather is Puerto Rican. It had never even crossed my mind that my Dad and his older brother looked a lot different from their younger three sibling.

 

[Marchand63]

Well shocking, not so sure. A cousin did one side of the families Italian genealogy back centuries. She found we are related to Pope Gregory XIII, who coined the Gregorian calendar. Nice.

However we also found a relative who was a bootlegger in Sicily & subsequently shot & killed . Guess that's why our family emigrated.

 

[mummabear]

Neither is mine but I do have two stories.
The first is from DHS Nana, she handwrote a autobiography which was found after she passed away. It told the story of the three loves of her life, and how her husband (DHs grandfather) wasn't the love of her life, she met him before he went off for WW2, the wrote back and forth, and his mother was lovely, but she was swept off her feet by an American solider who begged her on her wedding day to marry him instead, her story told how she had always regretted not going with him and how she had married her husband out of obligation (that she said she felt not that anyone else put on her)
However it really blew everyone's mind because they had been such a loving couple until they passed away-still the sort to hold hands in their 80's.

The other was another handwritten autobiography that a friends grandfather wrote which was again found after he passed away, telling about his time in the army, starting at boot camp through his time in Egypt before being caputered and then in a pow camp in Italy. It told of his escape with 2 other pows, they walked without food, water or shoes over a snow covered mountain being patrolled by the enemy. He was the only one to survive crossing the border.
It has been so long since I have read it I cannot remember where they worked out he crossed based on his records of where he was held/and where he arrived but the mountain they climbed over but I remember my friend saying that people now use oxygen tanks to climb it.
The most amazing part was that his story was less than 6 pages long!

 

[BlueStarryHat]

One of my Great-great grandfathers was a bootlegger. He was a baker by trade, but made moonshine or something on the side upstairs in the house. My grandfather told me that one day the still busted through the floor and onto my great-great grandmother's prized possession, her piano.

A photo. That's him in the sidecar being driven by my great-grandfather sometime soon after WWI:

 

[StitchesGr8Fan]

We found out my grandmother changed the name of the father on my aunt's birth certificate to match the father's name in my dad's birth certificate. However my aunt refuses to believe it is true.

 

[MrsDuck]

That no one could consistently ever spell our last name... I've found tons of variations in spelling and it makes it almost impossible to track people!

We also had a suicide by an uncle during the Depression but I learned that from my grandma while she was still alive.

 

[diznygirl]

My great-great Grandfather had a different last name. We don't know why he changed it, but the rumor is he was doing something illegal and was trying to hide. But it's on official records, which is how we found out, so how much hiding was he really doing?

I'm guessing we will never find out the real story.

 

[amberpi]

I was raised pretty upper middle class, (my dad owned a couple and was a publisher of newspapers and my mom was a teacher, so not wealthy, but they are very well respected in our community) my grandparents on my mom's side were rich (especially in land, my mom now owns a HUGE farm in 2 counties), all my aunts and uncles do well, some of them are VERY wealthy, but we have some insane stories in terms of our ancestors.

I had 3 of 4 great grandfathers killed due to boot legging (hello, they owned tons of land in Appalachia, they made whiskey!). One of my great grandmothers was first married to my great grandfathers older brother, when he got killed bootlegging, she just married my great grandfather. My grandmother who was married to the big farmer, went through a poor period in her childhood, after her father, my great grandfather was killed and before my great grandmother remarried a local banker who supposedly backed moonshiners.

I have 2 uncles who have children we don't know and have never heard of, although I know they provided for them very well. I'm the one who busted that information when I worked for the law firm another uncle owned during college.

My granddad wrote genaology books before his passing. He found the exact county in Ireland we were from (I've been MANY times) before we moved to England, and then got deported to America for being a horse thief. So, our line started so respectably! The 2 brothers who were sent out England then fought in the revolutionary war and got land grants in TN when it was still a part of North Carolina. My mom and her siblings still own a good bit of that land.

I had 2 great uncles or cousins that died on the Titanic, but they kinda sounded like *******s, so whatever. I had a great uncle/cousin who died on the Lusatania too. My grandfather didn't storm Normandy, he was a sailor right off the coast that day.

My family owned slaves and my grandparents city house and several of grand aunts/uncles owned homes that still had slave quarters on them. I'm not embarrassed of the boot leggers, but I am of that. I was also really disappointed when I found out how boring my genetic makeup is. Northern European with nothing interesting to break it up. I'm now convinced this is why I'm invisible to people with backpacks and strollers at WDW.

 

[amberpi]

My great-great Grandfather had a different last name. We don't know why he changed it, but the rumor is he was doing something illegal and was trying to hide. But it's on official records, which is how we found out, so how much hiding was he really doing?

I'm guessing we will never find out the real story.

It was really common for immigrants to americanize their names. May have not been anything untoward to it!

 

[powellrj]

Not my family, but DHs. When his parents died and we were cleaning out their house, we found out they had been married and divorced from each other 4 times. It did explain lots of things!

 

[Feralpeg]

My 13th great grandmother on my maternal side was Mary Tudor (Henry's sister).

 

[Duchie]

I found an article in an old Dear Abby-type column written by 2nd-great grandmother in 1892 asking her husband to come home. After some more digging we realized she lied about her age by about 10 years when they married. Don't know if he found out and then left her or what. But I have yet to be able to locate him anywhere after that.

I also found out what happened to DH's bio grandfather. Family stories were that he just sort of disappeared but no one knew what happened. I found out where and when he died (suicide) - his family was shocked.

 

[ronandannette]

My Mother's first husband was the adored eldest son of a rather controlling family. When he was killed in a farm accident they "highly encouraged" a marriage between DMom and their oldest grandson, in order to keep their son's "estate" in the family. Husband #2 was my Dad; he was 13 years younger than Mother but they were very happy together, albeit having a super-weird family tree. (My siblings were both my Dad's step-children and his cousins, my Grandmother was my Mother's former Sister-in-law and then her MIL, etc.)

 

[vek239]

This picture of my aunt isn't shocking, but she wrote "at Disneyland" on the back. Date stamped June 1959. She lived in Los Angeles; does anything look familiar to anyone?

 

[eileenjez]

My great-grandfather and his wife had a 40 year difference in their ages. Great-great-grandfather was a coachman from France who ran off with a Laird's daughter in Scotland. Got married on board the ship on their way to America but never got there. Landed in Ireland and stayed there. Had another relative who was with Fremont when he was surveying the West. A great-uncle who died in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

 

[eileenjez]

This picture of my aunt isn't shocking, but she wrote "at Disneyland" on the back. Date stamped June 1959. She lived in Los Angeles; does anything look familiar to anyone?
View attachment 232861

Is that the Monorail in the background?

 

[BrinkofSunshine]

Several generations back (my great-great-grandparents I believe) were Dutch settlers in South Africa. I believe my great-great grandmother (a child at the time) and her two siblings were waiting on the banks of a river for a boat when a crocodile came out and grabbed the youngest, a toddler