Wild family stories
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Hi guys,
Recently I’ve been digging through the past trying to reconcile some things in my mind and I called some relatives to ask about their memories of a certain time…only to have them reveal an incredible family secret.My grandfather was married to my grandmother and the father of three kids including my father. He had an affair with a married woman, Gina let’s call her, when the kids were at various stages of teenage hood. That affair produced a child, my aunt Tracy. He never told anyone about the affair or the kid. He convinced Gina to pass the baby off as her husband, Charlie’s child. When my aunt Tracy was 5, her parents divorced. My grandfather and grandmother divorced, and Gina and my grandfather got married…but still never told Tracy that my grandfather was her real father for years. She would search for Charlie who she thought abandoned her in phone books and couldn’t understand why he’d leave her. When she was 13 and they sat her down and told her they were getting divorced and also, hey Bob is your real dad!
Nuts, right! And this was the one guy in the family I thought was a stand up gentleman. He is very elderly and has leukemia now, and I do love him but my jaw dropped when I heard this! I had no idea. Any second family stories or weird stories out there? My husband had a friend whose dad was a guy with an entire second family in a nearby town. Bizarre.
Yeah man, I would never get a DNA test. I don’t want to know. Fucking men and their secret families. Someone was telling me recently about a dad who had a second family across the street. The audacity.
One of my aunts, who went through a very contentious divorce about 15 years ago, highly suspected her ex-husband of having a second family in China, where he traveled often for work. This has never been confirmed (at least not to me), but I feel like for her to suspect this, there had to have been something (behavior, something going on with the finances, etc.) that she picked up on. I feel like most people wouldn’t jump to that conclusion without something that raised an eyebrow. I know at least during the divorce he was hiding assets and whatnot. Her ex has been living in Hong Kong since they split. She has two son from that marriage, both of whom had strained relationships with their dad in the aftermath and that they’ve only really started to mend in the past five or so years. In 2019, the oldest son, who would’ve been early 30s at the time, went to Hong Kong to visit and met his dad’s girlfriend who was in her early 20s. He was easily in his 60s by then. Ick.
My aunt has since met a very decent man and while I’ve heard some stories that would suggest her marriage/divorced fucked with her for a long while, even after meeting her now-partner, I’m glad she’s met someone with a good heart who appreciates her. I am a big fan of kind eyes/faces, which he has.
I don’t even want to know how many random cousins I might have out there. My mother was one of about 6 (that she knows of) but they all got split up except for her and her older brother. I am curious to do a test just to find out but I think it’d be pretty traumatic for my mum.
Ok, I know someone whose brother is married to a lady who came from a huge family with a lot of siblings… Two of her adult siblings are in a relationship with each other.
My grandfather then married a woman -who he is still married to- who is a year younger than my dad, his eldest. The age difference really shows when you are in your nineties with leukemia and your wife has just hit her 60s.
I so want to do a dna test to find all this crap (I know one of my mothers brothers had many marriages, and many kids out of wedlock, some who showed up at our door out of the blue one day when I was little,) but I also don’t want like, Zuckerberg to eventually own my genetic data? That’s my hang up.
I’ve spent the day calling family courts in CT trying to track down the right one for divorce/custody agreements in the mid 80s.
The idea of people having second families is so odd to me. Like, how do you keep something that big hidden? I don’t understand. It also sounds exhausting to live that way. Or do the families kinda know and look the other way?
I’ve had quite a few friends/acquaintances end up on dates or in relatively short relationships with men they met online who are secretly married or in relationships. In just about every situation I can think of, it reached a point where the man was acting shady enough that alarm bells went off (or the wife/gf found out and messaged them) and every time, the friend/acquaintance has been rightfully grossed out and shut it down. Like it’s hard to imagine it escalating to full fledged second family.
My Grandfather was a Merchant Marine. When I was young he was on a route to the Orient. My Grandmother told me this story long after he had passed. It seems he had to change his route because of a letter he received. He ported out to Cuba for years. He received a letter one day telling him that he was to be a Father. But wait, he has a wife and a grown child….yes, he had a long-term mistress in Cuba. My Grandmother, chuckling as she tells me this, says he went mildly ballistic then started laughing then started making arrangements to change his route before he was due to report back. Why? Grandfather had a vasectomy years before. He did tell my Grandmother that he always suspected his mistress had other lovers when he was not in Cuba.
Don’t even ask about my Grandparents’ marriage…I just can’t with that…but whatever they had worked for them.
I can barely keep up with the life I have now. I can’t begin to imagine a second one.
I don’t know of any crazy family secrets. I do have one aunt that trades up husbands. Each new, richer husband started as an affair while in a current marriage.
The husband’s mom is adopted. She has no desire to find her birth family. As far as she’s concerned, her family is her family. His maternal grandparents were pretty strong Catholics so we’re both guessing it was a young pregnancy type situation.
I wrote this on another thread too, but my grandmother’s younger brother died in battle in WWII, his submarine was sunk by the Japanese after it sank some of their ships. It was late 1944 and he was 23, having been in college for most of the war. Apparently in college he used to earn money by impregnating women who couldn’t conceive with their husbands. You have to wonder how much of that was going on throughout history until modern sperm donation came to be. And was it through a doctor, or just informal like he was known as a guy who would do that? And how many times did he do this? I wish I could ask my grandmother the details but she’s been gone a long time.
