so any stories were seen as progress

My mother's family left China when the Communists took over. By then one of my uncles had died. He was sickly and it was too dangerous to get him to a hospital. She said once that when she got to Taiwan she had to learn Taiwanese quick so she'd know what the schoolgirls were saying when they cursed her. That's one of maybe about ten things I know about my mother's life before our family. She never tells stories, just keeps it all inside.

I visited Taiwan for the first time (and only time, so far) about a decade ago. I met a grand aunt and cousin for the first time; before the trip, I didn't know about them at all. My grand aunt was very excited to see me and said, "It must be so nice for you to finally see Taiwan, your mother must have told you so much about it." And I said no, actually she's hardly told me anything at all. My grand aunt looked very sad and said, "Yes, it was a very hard time back then, too."

This doesn't have to do with the military, but I'll never forget it. And I always wonder that if it wasn't for the war, if my mom would've been a happier person and my family happier too.

Cool idea, halonine. What did you make of Taiwan?

We were visiting my aunt-in-law. Neat lady. Never married, never moved. Still lived in the family home. She'd been the Town Librarian for her hometown until she retired at age 75. All the children in her family had college degrees which was rare in her time.

So, this spry, but sheltered lady was telling us about going somewhere on the train. The passenger train didn't stop in her hometown. She calmly told us about how she jumped from the moving train as it slowed for the mail! We couldn't believe it. Nobody else in the family knew that story, so we made sure to tell everyone about her hobo days...

One of the big secrets that my cousins and I have always wondered about involved our grandmother. The anecdote goes like this:
Our nonna was famously vain, a beautiful woman, she carefully maintained her appearance to her dying day. So vain, she lied shamelessly about her age until she was in her eighties.
Anyhoots, one day in the 1960's, when my mother was still a teenager, my grandmother suffered some sort of accident/incident/illness that nearly cost her her life. She ended up in the ICU in a coma. It was touch and go, and my mother and the rest of the family crowded around her bed for days, praying she would awake. When she finally came to, the doctors stood around her and said, "Mrs. B, Mrs. B, do you know where you are? Do you know the date?" and the like, and my darling nonna was too confused and couldn't answer. Then the doctor asked, "Mrs. B, how old are you?", and my nonna promptly replies "35!". My whole family breathed a sigh of relief, because nonna was really in her late forties, but was conscious enough to provide her lie age, so she must be fine. Indeed, she was, she recovered fully and lived to the ripe old age of 85.
Now, great story, but what we have always wanted to know was what happened to our nonnie that she ended up in a coma in the first place? No one is talking. We haven't gotten a single person to fess up about what happened. Big family secret, I guess one that everyone plans on taking to the grave.
Man, does my family have secrets. That's not even the best one! That's just the only one I can tell without having someone throw a malocchio on me.

msali: What's a malocchio? :)

chuckdarwin: I like Taiwan. It's modern but it's not as fast-paced as Hong Kong or Tokyo. Going there felt like returning to something I didn't know I'd left, if that makes sense.

Malocchio, Halonine is literally the 'evil eye'. Italians are famous for superstitiously cursing one another, although usually not other family members. I might get it, though, if I tell too many stories, although I would love to tell you all the one about how I found out about how my nonno REALLY went blind....

My family mystery is this: my mom and uncle (twins) were adopted during WWII. They were told they had been born to a woman with a lot of other children whose husband was away in the war, and they were told their birth names, and that they were born in Anniston, Alabama (which is a big military town). They were raised in Opelika, Alabama, but most of the (adopted) family is from Miami.

The thing is, as they grew up, they came to look just like their adopted family. Neither one ever had any interest in tracking down their birth mother (and were both very bitter towards her, truth be known) but they sometimes wondered if they'd been adopted within the family. (They did spend time in an orphanage, but it still could have been that my grandmother and grandfather decided to go get them out.)

My grandmother died when I was a teenager, and all my great-aunts and -uncles are long gone. When my mom got old enough to apply for Social Security, we had to go online to get her birth certificate sent to her, because she'd never had one. The only one the state could find (and it worked for our purposes, since it has the name she grew up with) was the one re-issued at her adoption, where it says, in my grandmother's handwriting, that my mom and uncle were born in Birmingham, not Anniston.

Now, my grandmother REPATEDLY said they were born in Anniston, so everyone wonders which was a lie, and which was the truth, and how many other facts of their birth and adoption are not what they thought they were. And everyone who might know, within the family anyway, is dead.

BTW, my mom and uncle were three years old when they were adopted, but have no memory of their birth mother, so they aren't sure how long they were at the orphanage.

My uncle was quite a few years younger than my mother and her sister. My grandparents were surprised by his arrival and weren't ready to give him much of an upbringing, so he rebelled, eloping with his older girlfriend at sixteen, getting into drugs, and eventually drowning in a swimming pool. When I grew up it was always an accidental drowning, but a couple times, my mom explained that my uncle "hadn't taken his medicine and had a seizure in the pool." At other times I asked my mom and her sister if he had epilepsy, or asthma, or something that might give him seizures, and they always denied it. All this hedging while I was a kid, my grandfather's and mother's (and let's face it, my own) penchant for self-medication, and the whole family's reactions to my troubled cousin throughout my life, has led me to believe that he died of a drug overdose while swimming.

After my uncle died, my cousin was given into the custody of my grandparents, who, if they weren't ready for a kid when my uncle was born, certainly weren't ready for a kid when he died. They tried, but my cousin inherited my uncle's wild hair. When he was ten or so, my mother's sister's family took him for a few years, until he painted racist slogans on a neighbor's house and shot my cousin in the face with a BB gun.

So he was on his own, and on his own he caught himself up in drugs and self-pity, and found himself a girl who would sacrifice herself to enable his worst aspects. When my grandfather died, the families gathered at my grandfather's house waited for his arrival. My parents were scared of him; my aunt covered up her fear by spoiling for a fight, telling all of us what a no-good shit he was and how he would never change.

I hadn't seen him since we were kids. He looked like Steve Earle, and everyone was aghast when I hugged him at the door and we shared our condolences and assessed one another. My aunt laid into him at once, accusing him of showing up just to get drug money. I told her to lay off him, and to have some respect for the dead, if not for herself.

My cousin and I didn't have so much to talk about but we did talk, mostly about misunderstanding, and change, and acknowledging wrong, and second and third chances, and about the immobility self-pity can cause. As I talked to him I hoped, kind of hopelessly, to be honest, that somehow this conversaation we were having would inspire him; I thought that maybe if I was to give up my life and try to help him for awhile he might be okay; mostly I just knew that he was going to die if he kept living this way.

Between when I was twelve and about fifteen, sometimes my mother would look at me and, out of the blue, start crying. I looked so much like my uncle sometimes that she would shudder, and get a chill, and the tears would come. She'd apologize, and say it was silly of her, but it scared me, and still does, because at times I've felt like both my uncle and my cousin.

My cousin killed himself with a gun a couple of summers ago during a bout of depression and drug use, and my aunt breezily delayed telling my mother and me until after he was buried. I missed him in life, and I missed him in death, just wide of the mark.

I always wanted to make a difference in his life, and I couldn't. I always wanted to blame someone else for this, but I can't. My aunt? She's protecting her own. My parents? They're protecting me. Myself? I can't be both of us. My cousin? I love my cousin. Nothing feels better than blood, and nothing feels worse than blood spilled.

I guess that's not really much of a mystery, but one thing leads to the next, like the skin of an onion.

Well, I just wrote a few paragraphs about a box of old letters and a family history project and a slew of [unspecified, as they aren't mine to share] minor-league secrets, and do I share them with the people the really affect or keep mum for a while... and as I previewed, my browser crashed for no reason.

I'm not superstitious, but I think I'll pretend that was a sign. Given my feeling of relief, that's the right choice.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this family mystery here before, but not for some time... My grandmother had a brother named Morty. In the 1960s, Morty had a wife and young children, and he ran a gas station in Philadelphia. One day in February, Morty disappeared, taking only summer clothes with him. He never returned.

I didn't even know about Morty until I was probably a teenager; he is NEVER mentioned by anyone in my family. It was my step-great grandmother who brought him up. But apparently, the widespread belief is that the gas station was a front for the mafia (Russian mafia? Italian? I don't know. Morty was a Russian Jew.) and that things were about to go south for him so he disappeared, presumably to somewhere warm considering what he packed.

That should be "One day in February, sometime in the 1960s..."

My mother had a younger sister, who was disowned from the family as a teenager. My mother hasn't seen her since then, and my grandfather never talks about her. Even when my grandmother died, no one knew how to get in touch with her. And yet, I don't even know why she was kicked out, or whether she left on her own volition, and even if she's still alive.

I have a coworker who, until he was 45, didn't know that the woman he always thought was his sister was, in fact, his mother, and the woman he thought was his mother was, in fact, his grandmother. Apparently, his mother got pregnant very young and decided to keep the child.

A year after my grandfather died, we went back to his hometown (a tiny place on the Alberta/Saskatchewan border) to scatter his ashes. To get to the field we scattered him in (real prairie, complete with sagebrush, cactus, big sky), we walked through the cemetery where his parents are buried. Under the headstone with the family name were three horizontal stones: one for each of his parents and one for someone none of us had ever heard of, who had died fairly young (I think in his 20s or 30s), shortly before my father was born. We later found out that my great-grandparents took in a few orphans during and after the Great Depression, and wonder if this was one who died while still living on the farm. As everyone who would have been around at that time has since died, we'll probably never know.

My mother was a drug addict and alcoholic, and abandoned me and my half-sister when I was six and my sister was three. I went to live with my crazy father, and my half-sister was adopted by some family friends. The mystery is that there's another child out there of my mother's, a girl named Geneva who should be in her early 20's now. When my mother died of hep-C last year, my sister and I tried to get in touch with Geneva through our mother's family. We knew that my mother had kept Geneva, but we didn't even know her last name. We wrote letters that my aunt promised to send, but we never got a response, and she won't tell us anything about Geneva at all that would help us find her, so we know the letters were never sent. I always wanted to find my mother someday, and since she died before I was ready or able, I'd like to find my half-sister who grew up with her, but the family seems desperate to keep us apart.

Fourteen years ago, I saw my wife's father for the first time. He was a force of nature... kind of inexplicable. He came out when my wife was 16... and split shortly thereafter. None of us in my British family have seen him in five years. He is unaware of several children who have been born in the last few years. We don't even know where he is, precisely. He's a very complicated guy.

I hope he comes around.

No one knows why my grandmother moved herself and all her children from Nebraska to Washington alone. There are other mysteries, but its the only 'open secret' of the family.

My paternal grandmother was born in Ireland, just outside Belfast. She came to America as an infant and was raised Catholic.
It wasn't until she was older that she discovered just why her family came here so quickly when they'd stuck it out through the famine (well, beyond the whole "country undergoing civil war at the time).

It turns out her devout Catholic father wasn't quite what he seemed. He was born to a protestant family, and raised such. I don't know anything about them beyond that they're in some way related to the man who was personal secretary to Princess Margaret for most of her life. When he met her mother, my great grandmother, he apparently fell in love and begged her to marry him for months until she agreed.

The problem being, she was a Catholic (and by all accounts from an extremely republican family- which did not mean the same thing there and then as it does here and now). His family disowned him and, although her family was less harsh, the community treated both of them as outcasts. Apparently, as family lore goes, my great-grandmother was walking home from mass one Sunday when some men from the parish accosted her, pushed her into a puddle and said several unkind things because she had married a protestant. And my great grandfather had the family packed and on a boat by the end of that week.

When they came here it was decided that since she was much more devoted to her faith, and because the Irish community was predominantly Catholic, he would just go to mass with her and not mention he had ever been anything but a Catholic.

According to one of my brothers, based on that one protestant ancestor of English stock, if somehow about 1100 people in line for the throne of England were to die, my oldest brother Aragorn would become king. (but then, he wouldn't, being a Catholic and all)

These stories are amazing. I thank you for sharing.

We have run-of-the-mill family embarrassments, but I'm not privy to any big, big secrets. What I love about this, though, is how clearly it shows that our myth of the simple, straightforward, plain-dealing nuclear family is really ever so complicated.

My brother and I are really eager to get the DNA cheek swab thing done - the one that matches your genetic data with historic populations to suggest what populations you are descended from. We know about our solid half that's Irish, but we're curious about my grandfather. He never talked much about his father and mother; but the man looked so Native, it's uncanny. He looked like SItting Bull, and my brother and father have the ramrod-straight black hair and hawk-bill nose that my grandfather had. We've always wondered if he was quiet about his parentage out of the shame it might have been to be born part Native in the 20s. BUt until we get the test, it's speculation.

your older brother is named Aragorn! That's awesome.

your older brother is named Aragorn! That's awesome.

Dad was a big Tolken fan (IE hippie). I would have been Arwyn, but my mom wouldn't stand for that shit like his first wife did.
He actually goes by his middle name now, since he got so much shit over the years for it.

I realized last night that my maudlin and thrice-retold family mystery wasn't the best one:

My paternal grandmother was an orphan. Her mother, a Scotch-Irish pauper, died bearing her in Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century. Her father was said to be a French-Canadian trapper or logger who left town before anyone knew my great-grandmother was pregnant.

So my Grandma Grace grew up in a Catholic orphanage, where she learned from the nuns to be rootless Irish and to laugh at authority. Eventually she met my grandfather, Clarence, a Sears Roebuck floor salesman at the main downtown store, who assiduously won her from the clutches of the nuns (that's how she put it) and never required her to go to church again.

Though her formal education ended with high school, she self-educated for the rest of her life, particularly about ancient art (she was a nut about museums), and I remember picking out, year after year, big coffee-table books full of pictures of the pyramids, or of Tel Barak eye idols, or of Hagia Sophia; my dad would say, "She likes big books that she can spread out in her lap and read in bed."

My grandfather died in the mid-sixties during open-heart surgery, so she was always the only grandparent on my dad's side, though she more than made up for his absence with wit and charm and snuggles.

She was a staunch anti-creationist back when everybody accepted evolution as fact, before our country was bewitched by superstition and ignorance, and my dad would always respond to her jeremiads against the pernicious threat the creationists posed, "Mom, that's crazy. Everybody believes in evolution now."

I can feel her pinching us on the arm now, saying, "I told you so."

I'm sorry I missed this thread, and I'll add to it, in case anyone cares to read on...

I grew up knowing I was English, Irish, and American Indian (or Native American, sorry, it's late and I'm tired). Some other things too, but those were the main three. My great-grandmother on my father's side was a Cherokee. Also, I grew up knowing my biological grandfather died in a dispute over a gun. He and my grandmother were driving in their car (they lived in rural Georgia in the late 1940's early '50s), drinking. My grandfather wanted to take my father shooting, and my grandmother did not. They argued over a gun, it went off, and my grandfather died (my father was about 5 years old, and his sister was about 6 months old).

Fast forward to my grandmother's surprise 80th birthday party. It was a birthday/reunion, so I saw lots of relatives I hadn't seen since I was a child. (My parents divorced when I was 10, and I had very sporadic contact with that side over the years). It was through the family geneologist that I discovered:

1. We are not Cherokee. We are liars. Apparantly, the government felt really bad about how they'd treated the Cherokee (The Trail of Tears and all), and offered free land lots to people of Cherokee descent. My father's family were "Black Irish", and lied to get themselves some land. I cant' tell you how disappointed I was to learn I didn't have a speck of Native American in me.

2. My grandfather did not die struggling over a gun with my grandmother. He died leaning against a tree some 50 feet away from the car, and my grandmother shot him once right in the eye with a rifle. Our mystery? That she did not spend one day in jail. Seems that the loss of a man like my grandfather was good for the town.

2a. My grandfather's father shot and killed his own 16 year old daughter in the 20's (I think) because she was sleeping with the town minister.

Did my ex-husband get off lucky, or what? If I killed him, I could claim it was in my genes! On my mothers' side we served royalty and also lived in gigantic English homes. On my father's side - liars and murderers. Quite the mix!

I caught that, redvixen, thanks to the Recent Comments feature. Very interesting! Thanks for including it.

Note to self: never, ever piss off redvixen.

Amen! Never piss off redvixen! Thank you for sharing! :)