What are your family secrets?

One of mine:

My cousin is unaware that my uncle is not his father. My father is his father and so he's my half brother.

Neither my uncle nor my mother know this.

I found out when I was 12 because I overheard my father talking about it with my uncle's wife.

Holy shit R1

Do you ever feel strange about this?

My turn... Just over a year ago, my family did an "Ancestry DNA group test" Guess who has a "different Daddy" than the rest of my family. Mom had an affair with her boss in the late 1950's when they lived in Philadelphia(worked in CC Philly). I am the youngest in the family. I was just contacted by birth Daddy's family 2 weeks ago. It's gonna be fun!!

My father is actually my son. No, he's never going to find out about it.

Yes and no, R2.

It's weird knowing about it when no on else does. I feel bad for my uncle because he's a really good guy who is clueless about what's been going on. Funnily enough it didn't really come as any big surprise to me when I found out because my dad has always been a selfish asshole, so it wasn't a shocker.

Bump for more secrets.

My half-"brother" may not be at all, his mother was a total whore and no one knows for sure we are biological family. He doesn't look like any of us.

My father fondled me one night when he thought I was asleep.

My half-"brother" may not be at all, his mother was a total whore and no one knows for sure we are biological family. He doesn't look like any of us.

My father fondled me one night when he thought I was asleep.

My mother only bought powdered milk when we were growing up!!!

Thank you, DL< for letting me finally be able to vent.

My great uncle had a secret family. His first wife died, and he left his son with her parents in OK, then he moved to Oregon. His obit doesn’t mention this son, and we never knew about it.

Within that branch, one cousin adopted a child who was never right. He was sentenced to prison for torturing someone at his gang location. In prison, he killed a man, the wrong man, because he was mad at someone else. He’s on Oregon’s death row, now. He also shares my name. Yikes!

My Mom was a daily Church goer. Her mother may have had her first and second kids not by my Grandpa, around age 16. So, she was a floozy. She finally met Grandpa Otto, who was 20 years older. They were never married because Grandpa had another wife and daughter in Germany. He worked in a band at a burlesque theater. He died of syphilis in his forties. Oh, Grandpa!

They were all very nice people, though. I can vouch for them.

We're way too white trash of a family to keep secrets. Appearances in the pig sty aren't nearly as comforting as a roll in the mud.

My grandfather was married once to a woman he met on a drunken weekend before he met my grandmother. The only one he told was my mother, who didn't tell me until a few years ago. His children would have been appalled.

My brother cheated on his wife with a cam model he met online. He spent almost a 100k on her including making a down payment on her house. They never met in person.

My uncle physically forced my grandmother into a nursing home, convinced her to sign a power of attorney and took all her money. He then accused me of stealing it because I had been her primary caregiver. At her funeral he tried to hug me and I told him if I ever saw him again I'd kill him. I know grandma would have been proud.

I also know that my mother had an affair with her married boss but I've never told anyone.

A cousin (deceased) ran a major bookmaking operation out of his palatial mansion, employing his 2 sons. He was eventually raided by the FBI and it came out that the operation was taking millions of dollars of bets per week. It went on for 3 years before the FBI shut him down, attached all his bank accounts that had millions of dollars in them, and about 15,000 acres of land he owned. The mansion was free and clear as it was built by and owned by his wife who was wealthy on her own. We heard (from his father) later on that the FBI never found a $1 million stash of $100 bills he had hidden. Interestingly enough, he was never indicted. We just assumed the authorities must have been happy enough to get all that money and the land.

Within 1 year after the FBI raid he dropped dead one day as he was getting out of his car. Massive heart attack.

My paternal grandfather (who was born in 1901) apparently ran around getting married to women in different states after he came back from fighting in ww1 (wich no one knew about). During an ancestry search I found at least 7 marriage licenses issued to him from Texas to Colorado. No records of divorce decrees though. I also found out that he never married my dads mom ! I might have relatives from coast to coast. I never told anyone he didnt marry my dads mom,I figured most of them are old or dead so why bother? Apple doesnt fall far from the tree because my dad knocked up 3 other women before he married my mom,who he had also knocked up. If nothing else,my family was fertile.

From my extended family: an uncle of mine died from "pneumonia" in the early 1990s. Sure, Jan.

R16, too vague.

They are legion.

My grandfather owned tenement buildings in my dad's home country and due to disrepair and dry summer heat one of them collapsed, killing two children. It was a national scandal and the catalyst for massive change in the housing there for the lower classes. Buildings like his were torn down and huge public housing towerblocks were put in their place. It's never spoken about in my family, and I was almost fifty before ai even learned of it. I knew they used to own property, but I just assumed it was sold at some point.

You are all freaks

R17, uncle was a barely closeted [but very attractive and sexually active] man in his mid 30s -- a real stallion at the peak of his attractiveness and strength -- when he fell ill in the 80s. One aunt always knew he was gay but let's just say that other relatives were in denial up until the very end about his mysterious illness. I was too young to know what was really going on, but my aunt divulged everything to me when I came out to her years later.

My oldest sister's my half sister. She was about 2 years old when my mom married my dad. My sister found out in her teens and I found out from a family friend who mentioned it in a way that he thought I knew, but didn't until he said it.

My mom doesn't know I know. I'm not out to her and I figure if she ever comes clean about who the baby daddy is I'll come out.

A friend of mine recently found out that he and his twin sister, who were adopted as infants, and who have another pair of siblings who are twins, and also adopted, are really their actual siblings. In finding this out, they also discovered that their adopted father was their biological father.

He had been having an affair with their birth mother for years and when she got pregnant (twice), their father and his wife, "adopted," them.

I know a woman who has two daughters but would occasionally me too her two sons back in Canada. I asked if they with her dad one day and she smiled and said no, so I just dropped it. A lot judged her for not having them live with her here, but I held off on it figuring she had her reasons.

It turns out the father of the two older boys is her own father who molested her until she was a late teen, and only stopped when the authorities found out (not sure how).

He ended up in prison and apparently she was a movie of the week at some point in the 80s.

R23 did the man's real wife legally adopt those kids, or just raise them as her own? Obviously he wouldn't have had to go through a legal adoption since he was their real father.

My biological mother was raped by her cousin and put me up for adoption and then I fell in love with her brother but it turned out my biological mom was adopted too so it wasn't incest and then it turned out her cousin who raped her was also adopted so that wasn't incest either.

My adoptive mother hated everybody involved.

R25 both their parents adopted them.

Their Birth/Adopted father apparently went through the entire charade making the birth mother put them up for adoption and then he and his wife legally adopted them.

I've told this story before. My twin brother is gay and married to a woman. I found gay porn on his computer years ago and he has a grindr profile a friend alerted me to. No one in the family knows but me, My brother is the most judgemental cunt alive and gave me hell when I came out and continues to look down his nose at me for being gay. Hypocrite, yes. Bigger the homophobe, bigger the closet case. I would never out him but he has almost pushed me to do it. I stay away from him,

R28 why haven't you confronted him about it since he's such a cunt? Couldn't you do that without outing him to the family?

That's why I keep the screenshot of his grindr profile, one day when he's being a cunt, I will. I feel sorry for his wife, she's a decent person albeit terribly naïve. He buys clothes for her to wear and they have pedicures and manicures and facials together. Their relationship resembles a straight woman, gay best friend scenario.

R30 how do you know its his profile. Does he use his face?

Photo from the neck down, I know my twin brothers body, he also has a tattoo that he hasn't blurred out, the fool, He had the distance function on so my fiend and I went and sat in my brothers street in my friends car just to be certain and sure enough he was 20 metres away. It's him alright. Not the brightest tool in the shed.

Be honest, R32, did you message him?

I didn't, no, my friend did though. We had him going for days talking shit till we told him we knew who he was and he blocked us and deleted grindr.

So is he a top or bottom, R34? Do his preferences match yours?

yuck that's not funny

R36, I wasn't trying to be funny. Genuinely wondering, as twins, if your preferences were the same.

Oh. Lol. Sorry. I don't know, he hadn't filled that bit out.

Just a few private Christmas traditions.

Not funny, but hot.

He refused to have me as part of his wedding party because my homosexuality would embarrass him. He is a bitter little man, must have a lot of self hatred.

R41, I would have already laughed at him and whispered in his ear that he was a cock sucking gay and I had the proof to ruin him so he'd better shut the fuck up about that.

He's the kind of cunt who would turn it all round and say that I had made the profile just to discredit him. And my family and his friends would believe him. He is a first class cunt. He will destroy himself soon enough though.

The boy did it

Where do I fuckin start

Never, repeat NEVER touch Uncle Bill's hair

I didn't touch those kids or the fuckin wire hangers

R43, I figured he'd claim it was just your profile and you were trying to make him look bad.

But I'd still say something along the lines, of, "you can lie all you want to everyone else.. but we both know you're a self-hating, cocksucker."

I was going to print the profile out and make it into a Christmas card and send it to him.

When there was a sale, I got the 23&Me DNA profile, and discovered my older brother and I are only 53.4 % related: same mother, but different fathers. Which indicates my mother had an affair with some man around March of 1944, while my father was working weekdays in D.C.

I know that my father was the man married to my mother, because I have always looked like him, which many people have pointed out. But my brother didn’t; our mother even said on several occasions he took after her side of the family. She never said anything further about his parentage.

My brother had done 23&Me before me. He has never acknowledged that he was aware of our history, and I won’t tell him. He’s now 74, and the only reason to do that would be to hurt him.

R50 how do they tell you that without your brother's information?

I know you won't believe me, but my father is a generous and gentle lover.

Darling, I can tell you now—your father went through life with an open fly.

R28, print out the Grindr profile, tape it to the bottom of everyone's plate and before you say grace at Thanksgiving, tell everyone to flip their plate over.

Or leave a note in his mailbox: I Know Who You Blew Last Summer

Possibilities are endless really.

While your brother deleted that Grindr profile, you can bet he has another. Someone like him won't be able to resist.

Don't ask.

My retard nephew dresses up as a bat and his "secret" lover think he's a bird

I didn't actually marry Joan

After I threw all the straws, I picked them up off the filthy floor and put them back for the customers to use

My uncle shot his son over a land dispute. The immediate family made it seem like a suicide to avoid the notoriety. The local law officials were lazy and didn't want the hassle so they went along with it even though they could have proved it wasn't suicide. My uncle died almost a decade ago so he did get away with murder.

Geez, I got nothing.

A maternal aunt at 18 ran off and married a dentist, who was in his mid 40s. Huge scandal at the time.

My mother never forgave her and said it was embarrassing to have to explain her when she was forced to.

Me: Did you get free dental?

Mom: For a little while.

I used my pull to get my husband on TV

My parents are both total messes. You have my father who is a chronic cheater (man, woman, he doesn't give a fuck. Sex is sex to him I guess). And a bit of a manipulative control freak. He doesn't come out and say "you can't do this thing, go to this place, talk to this person, etc." but rather "encourages" you not to ("I don't think it's a good idea because....") and if you go against his wishes and do what you want anyway, you get the silent treatment with an angry scowl.

Then you have my mother who constantly posts on Facebook about what a piece of shit my father is, how horribly he treats her, and how unhappy she is in the marriage. And my father doesn't use any form of social media so he doesn't have a clue. She smiles to his face and acts like everything is fine. She's been saying all this for years but has never done anything about it. Sometimes I think she enjoys the attention and sympathy it brings her.

A lot of people would rather be miserable but stay with someone rather than be alone and happier. There's a stigma about being single - "why aren't seeing someone? when are you gonna get married?" It's usually miserable married people wanting to drag happy single people down to their level.

My dad is secretly gay. I caught him with another man, told my mom and he denied it to my face. She believes him not me. We are not on speaking terms obviously.

My aunt had a baby out-of-wedlock in the early 60s and put him up for adoption. Years later, she married a very nice guy and they were married 40 years when she died of cancer. They had one child, but it took forever for her to conceive for some unknown reason. That boy was spoiled rotten and given everything he ever wanted, but he and my uncle never knew that part of the reason for that was my aunt's other son who she never knew. My cousin grew up believing he was his mother's only child.

My cousin is such a snotty bastard (a 30-something millennial, of course) that now that his mother is dead I'm tempted to tell him he has a brother somewhere just to rattle his cage a bit. Perhaps after my uncle is dead and gone...

A great uncle kept a black mistress. This in a very small East Texas Baptist town where everyone knew everyone's business. I never knew but a family friend told me all about it.

These stories are better than any soap opera or pulp novel.

I come from a big Irish American family on my mother’s side. I’m one of 28 cousins. Back in the 80s my cousin killed someone and hid the body. I was only 7 at the time and didn’t get the details until years later. The official story was that the victim was gay and came on to my cousin, who killed him in self defense. Yeah. I’m so sure.

R69, is your cousin gay? Was the body found?

I have a profile here but I’m going anonymous because.

One of my older siblings had a daughter she gave up at birth. We finally found the daughter on one of those DNA sites after decades of search. The older sibling has always lied why she put the daughter up for adoption the truth is the daughter is unattractive and she was an ugly baby and she didn’t want the baby she lied and said because of her job she couldn’t keep the baby.

This part is unfortunate. My eldest sibling another sister was verbally abusive to one of our parents and it culminated into a terrible case of elder abuse, neglect and financial exploitation. Roaches in the home unplugging the phone so our parent couldn’t contact anyone. Vile.

I advocated for this long distance and the evil sibling manipulated social workers so I looked like the out-of-town busybody.

The sibling manipulated our parent and got everything in the will they are currently residing in the family home!

But no worries the evil sibling is obese with bad health problems I’m just waiting for her to croak to say she’s evil is an understatement. Fortunately when she dies another sibling gets the property so the property stays in the family.

I have more but I’ll stop here my family is like a Tennessee Williams play. Of course I’m in therapy but I’m not medicated on pills, only medicinal marijuana.

I have a cousin who was obsessed with money she stole her parents assets by getting them to agree to put her name on the deeds to the house and vacation homes and other financial assets. She also stole the assets of an elderly aunt and uncle. Her brother and sister will not speak to her and will not be seen in the same place. We jokingly say when M. is around don't sign anything.

R70- Not sure if he’s gay but he never married (in a family where EVERYONE marries) and was a complete mess his whole life, drugs, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was. Out of all the cousins nobody is out. The body was found, that’s how he got caught. I remember the aunts and uncles had a meeting about it and we were all little kids trying to eavesdrop. This happened in Virginia Beach. He didn’t do much time. It isn’t discussed in the family so it’s hard to get the details.

[R51]: Apparently not. When I contacted 23&Me, attempting to validate this, the answer I received from some official was little more than technical gobbledygook, signifying nothing, sheer nonsense.

Apparently, this happens more often than anyone admits.

I was shocked, but not really surprised. My mother lied about a lot of things, and fairly often. Attempting to make sense of what she said was confusing. When I was about 4, I was dropped off by a neighbor, and found my mother in bed with some man. When I asked her about it, she hit me until I shut up. I didn’t remember any of it until I was about 5 years sober.

So, actually, what 23&Me reported actually validated what I had known for years. Now it’s only me and my older brother still alive; everyone else is gone.

My great uncle was a gay guy who frequented “fairy balls” in NYC at the beginning of the 20th century. My Dad was best man, when he married a spinster. No kids.

My mother has been an opiate painkiller addict for 50 years since she was misdiagnosed as having aggressive stage III breast cancer. She's still alive at eighty! It's a fucking nightmare.

Not quite a secret, but I had an uncle who probably murdered the entire family of his business partner. It’s hardly a secret, but no one talks about it.

My maternal grandma was similar to or worse than Livia Soprano, extremely self-centered and incapable of kindness. My paternal grandma was very nice, but every time I was around her (paternal grandma), I expected her head to swivel 360 like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." (I didn't trust that my paternal grandma was really just a nice lady.)

My maternal grandma died recently and I shed not a single tear in sadness. It really is true that the dead are deified. I hear family members talk about my maternal grandma and I'm thinking, "What? Are we talking about the same person?"

Thanks, everybody, for sharing your stories. I am enjoying reading it all.

Some family members we call "cousins," are part of a big family, lots of siblings among them, and are very involved in their religion. They're also very big Youtube "stars," who have a huge following and have built an empire off of their, "brand."

One of my cousins has a boyfriend who she has been with for a few years. He's also very religious, the perfect guy, and she's set on marrying him. The entire family loves him. Including her dad.

I should say, especially her dad.

Her father and her boyfriend have been fucking each other for at least a year now.

I found out because on a visit, they were careless, and I caught her father plowing and making out with her boyfriend, on video.

Everyone seems to be clueless. This is the first I've said about it to anyone. I won't be mentioning it ever to my family.

Share a screenshot or two.

#1 When he was 19, my uncle survived an attempt murder where he got 5 bullets, on his chin, thighs, legs, arms and feet. The official story is that he had a jealous roommate who couldn't stand he got all the pussy in the world and he got none so he shot my uncle out of envy then killed himself. The truth is that they were both lovers, got caught by a housekeeper whom got fired then when uncle tried to end the relationship the jealous boyfriend shot him and committed suicide. Learning this truth in my family is the same as learning that Santa doesn't exist. We all learn the truth from our parents as we grow up unbeknownst to our uncle.

#2 The same uncle knocked up a 13 year old and left her to raise the child by herself when he was 23 and studying abroad. When my cousin turned 15 they finally reunited and he came visit us at my grandmas state with his beautiful mom who was, as expected, only 13 years our senior. She tried to seduce my uncle who was then married to his current wife and had 2 other kids our age. Angered he wouldn't respond to her advances she then had sex with one of my 16 year old cousins and left after grandma and the whole family found out. My cousin, the son of the slutty foreign still don't know why they had to leave early that summer. He's 37 now.

#3 When I came out to my mother, she tried to easy my mind by confiding in me that some relative had a 10 year relationship with another man and everyone knew about it but she wouldn't tell me who it was. I found out a couple of years ago that the person is her younger brother who's now at the final stages of dementia. My cousin, his son is bisexual and confided in me this but I don't know if I'll ever have the courage to tell him that his father he can't even communicate with was bi too. Should I ever tell him? He turned 22 this summer and I'm like his older brother who knows what is like to be gay.

My father kind of molested me. He thought I was asleep and touched me inappropriately. I confronted him years later about it when I was angry with him and he didn't deny it. I caught him and one of his male employees getting it on one night. His marriage to my mother and his current wife (#3) were/are cold and distant. No one likes him, we just have to put up with him because he has money.

My mother, from a different brother, is actually my sisters' ex boyfriend's rescue dog. Go figure.

I am Mrs. Norman Maine.

My father once told me about his grandparents, and how they always slept in separate bedrooms. It was only after they had died that he learned the reason. His grandmother was the local (back-alley) abortion provider. His grandfather didn't approve, but like the money she brought in, so he never said anything. But then he found out that, after nine children) she terminated her own tenth pregnancy. He moved to another room and never forgave her.

Amazing family stories, these are stories no screen writer could ever create.

My father was a priest and my mother was a nun. My mother's best friend actually entered the religious community because she was in love with my father's best friend, who was also a priest, and she wanted to get close to him by any means possible. It worked.

At the time my parents were both disillusioned with the way their community and the Church were functioning and were thinking about getting out. My mom was also starting to crave having a family. They spent quite a bit of time together since they were kind of the other couple's chaperones, and they got along well.

The four of them ended up quitting the community, and the country. Since at the time they didn't know if they would be able to have an official religious or civil marriage, my father's best friend married my parents and my father married the best friends.

My father was an engineering genius who had a Irishman's neurotic aversion to attention and success. After he died we discovered he had over 20 patents, worth many millions, he had donated over his career to his filthy rich university and the Catholic Church.

I just learned that my mother is a sheep.

That explains my uncontrollable curly hair and my tendency to often exaggerate the vowel "A" when I speak.

My Baaaaaad ?

I have 2 female cousins who both got pregnant by the same man at the same time. One baby got put up for adoption.

My father didn't tell me he had two siblings until I was 14 and then he died. I met them at his funeral. Would've been nice to grow up with an extended family. His sister lived only 30 minutes away.

Not my own family, but a true incident of another family:

I used to teach at a small elementary school, where there was a young student with a wildly improbable name -Let's use Dinkle J. Mackelheimer, Jr. as it's not his real name, but gives the proper impression of obscurity. Now, imagine the surprise at the school when another boy transfers in from a school across town -A boy named Dinkle J. Mackelheimer, Jr.! The two boys are in the same classroom and become friends. They discover their birthdays are only a week apart. Massive coincidence! Not really. It seems Mr. Dinkle J. Mackelheimer Sr. had two wives, living only half a mile from each other. He got both women pregnant during the same week, and both gave birth to sons whom he named after himself. Somehow he kept his secret until one son was transferred to his brother's school. And then neither the boys nor their mothers knew -Only the school's office staff. Everyone was waiting for back to school night and parent-teacher conferences, let me tell you. Both mothers came to their conferences alone, and both came (alone) to back to school night. The secret was still safe.

It finally blew up when the boys invited each other to their birthday parties. Father was successful in making sure one party happened at Chuck E. Cheese while he was "away on business" –One party down, and still the secret was safe. But the second party the mother insisted on having it at home, and the second Dinkie Jr. was amazed, telling his mother that they had a few pictures of his dad at their house. Mom 2 was suspicious and visited Mom 1. What happened after that remains a mystery -to me, at least, and both boys moved to another school (or schools).

But no one was surprised when, a couple of years later, and sweet little girl named Dinkila Mackelheimer enrolled in kindergarten. No apparent relation to either Dinkle...

You can make this shit up, but this is actually true –I swear to Stephen Sondheim!

👬 EGAD ........ Doppelgangers !

My grandfather on his deathbed in the hospital told an uncle this story.

When my grandmother was 15 years old, she was hired by a doctor in our small town to help his invalid wife with their two daughters. From the first day, the doctor was raping her. She tried to tell her parents she didn't want to go, but they insisted. She was afraid to tell them what was happening - this was 1925.

My grandmother became pregnant with her first child. She finally told her sister. Her sister told her fiance what had happened. The fiance went into town and beat the doctor with a 2x4. The doctor nearly died and later moved his practice to another town.

The three of them decided that my grandfather would break his engagement with the one sister and marry the other - which he did.

My aunt does NOT know the story - only that her parents married because she was conceived. My great aunt lived with my grandparents for many years and never married.

I was told that my paternal grandmother was met, by my grandfather, in a "house of ill-repute" in Florida in the early 1940s. Both had been married once before (he was widowed, she was divorced). I believe she may have been "working" to survive and support the child she had from her first (by all accounts abusive) marriage. It is a subject that is not discussed openly and I would otherwise not have known about it save for the one random conversation with a family member who had also learned of it in unlikely circumstances.

My late uncle's godfather was an actual Godfather.

My hoozbunt agreet to geev me yoo ess citizensheep if i allow him to touch me in betroom. Aslo...shhh!...he ees Satan and ees plotting the ent oaf deemocracsy.

I was a junior in high school, when a senior in high school approached me said we were biological brothers. Our parents were unmarried when they had him and gave him up for adoption. But then they immediately got pregnant with me and this time they got married and kept me. I never knew I had a brother until that day. I went home from school and asked my parents, they denied, denied, denied. They tried to keep up the charade, but we looked a lot alike, and the woman who adopted my brother knew the story - it was small town . Our parents never ever acknowledged his existence and never allowed him to come to our house to visit. It was their biological child - my biological brother. And we were less than a year apart in age. I hated them for many things -- but this was their worst offense.

R95 Your great aunt was an amazing person, to give up on her marriage to protect her little sister.

Suffice it all to say that life, itself, happens to all of us.

It’s not a secret, but it’s not talked about. In the 1980s my father in law was buying a new house around the time his niece was getting married. The grooms family were longtime friends of his. The new couple had nowhere to live so FIL gave them his old house with the expectation they would live there. They sold it without ever moving in and moved to Florida. Did it on the sly, never even said goodbye. FIL didn’t know until they were gone. They have never spoken again. Please bear in mind that FIL was not wealthy. He was a Korean War ver and a butcher, and his wife had just died of cancer at 28. He was raising 3 kids, my husband being one of them. FIL was and still is an idiot.

Courtesy of a secret teen pregnancy in the 1960s, child was given away and I have a blood relative as a junior staffer in the current White House admin.

[quote] I have 2 female cousins who both got pregnant by the same man at the same time. One baby got put up for adoption.

R91 , Were those 2 cousins sisters? I have female cousins like that, sisters knowingly fucking the same guy. Ugh.

R104 I know identical twins. One had a casual fling with a guy in college, the other married him.

R102 It's really sad, but I don't think having a good heart makes your father in law an idiot.

The only one I'm aware of is that my grandparents were not married when my grandmother got pregnant with their first son (my uncle) which was only revealed when my cousin did a family tree project. They had managed to keep up the lie because they never actually said when they got married and never celebrated a wedding anniversary. When it was revealed we were all sad that they had been so concerned about something that to all of us did not matter at all.

The juiciest one I know of in someone else's family is that a girl I knew at school who was a year or too younger than me got pregnant at 14 with the science teacher's son's baby and her parents raised the baby as if it was theirs, which seems like quite a common thing to happen. I don't know if they ever told the child the truth though.

My very attractive parents met at the notorious gay hustler bar Peppermint Lounge in Times Sq. in the mid 60’s.

Dad was a bouncer and got plenty of propositions, and when I came out, after smoking a joint he told me he took a few of them, and that he was gay too when he was younger. Standing at the door, he would’ve met every gay and straight celebrity, artist and politicians of the era.

Mom was a gogo dancer, and when I met her best friend heard the other half of the story about how they’d dance up on a stage and on breaks had to go sit at a table set on the stage and couldn’t interact with any customers. I don’t think she did anything sleazy, as she was also a flight attendant but her friend might have been into prostitution- as her life now is positively ruinous. I have a feeling she met my father at just the right time, because the friend comes across with a lot of resentment and is always changing her backstory and lying about the past. I brought both women to NYC and toured 42nd St. 50 years later, they were enthralled. Can you imagine?

I heard through friends and family that my parents were so attractive together that they could walk into a room and silence it. Everyone thought they were celebrities.

R108 Would love to see a pic of them in their prime.

I found out the good dirt when Granny got Alzheimer's, that's when she started to tell the truth. I was most interested in the unmarried members of my family tree! I found out:

I had a great aunt and uncle who "never ate meat", and never married. They lived together and just let people think they were husband and wife. "Oh, Martha loved to run around with the boys all day, ride, shoot, better n most of um, but not when it came time for the hayride. Nope, not interested!" "Paul was the quiet type, like to read a lot, travel too. To the big cities."

One morning at breakfast, "Well I suppose you heard what happened to Freddy?". "No, what?". "He went out riding with the Klan last night up err in Mt. Harley.". Me- Stunned and skeptical at this new revelation, I stopped to assess, because with Alzheimer's, you never know. "Grandma, I never heard of black people in Mt. Harley". "Oh, they weren't there keeping out the blacks, they were keeping out the Catholics!"

For R109

R90 According to your farmer father she was quite the looker in her youth!

Not R109, but thanks for sharing the pic. Your parents were very attractive, indeed. Interesting story.

Thank you R108 your parents are hot by any standards I hope you inherited some of the good genes ( I suspect you have ).

My father is unaware that my brother sexually assaulted my sister for years, and that the cousins were involved.

I'm certain it's the reason my brother has barely been sober as an adult, and my sister has extreme psychological issues.

I'm hoping he never has to know.

R11- - they are so hot. Always shocked when someone of that era and styling looks good - and they are beyond GL, they are hot! Rate for that time,

Curious where - roughly, West Coast, Midwest, etc - they ended up moving and what kind of childhood you had and what you ended up doing with life.. Fascinating story!

^rare

My mom and her siblings were orphaned very young. Long story short: When she was 14, her older sister married a guy and took mom in. The older sister's husband raped her on a weekly basis. Mom never said anything because she needed a roof over her head. She never was certain her sister knew about this or maybe she was in denial.

Thirty years ago, my sister gave birth to my spoiled rotten, insufferable nephew because she had had four abortions that year and no doctor would perform another.

My mother is in denial that both my brother and I are gay, even though I outright told her. I cut off contact with my entire family, except my sister, when I went away to college at 18 (I'm 37 now), so I don't think my extended family knows either.

My brother is also a furry and a pedophile. Again, I told our mother, and she refused to listen.

My father raped my sister when she was a kid. My mom knew and did nothing. No one outside our immediate family knew. My mom told me and my siblings if we told anyone, even extended family, she would kill us.

My mom cheated on our dad. She conducted her little affairs while her kids were home because the men were married too. This sounds minor, but my mom cultivated a perfect wife/mother imagine and was incredibly judgmental about divorced people and such.

Me Gran bumped off me Mum.

My father has been fucking me since I was 12 years old.

My mother was a hooker.

^That's no secret.

Thanks R100, I think so, too.

Very nice picture of the parents! I love the 1960's!

One needs one's own thread.

No Burke

[quote]I have 2 female cousins who both got pregnant by the same man at the same time. One baby got put up for adoption.

Cletus, Lolita and Tangueray?

My nieces father in law would go out to San Francisco from NYC every month for a week or two. He claimed to be an bank executive in a bank in SF, most of us suspected he had another wife and family out there. He passed away last year so we will never know. We thought the other family might show up at the funeral but no one ever showed.

Could he have had a gay lover R129? SF??

R130 I don't think he did, he was in his mid 80s when he passed.

R111, your mom reminds me of Debbie Harry a bit.

When my sister was in L&D giving birth to her second child, the bed board at the nurse's desk said "Gravida 4, Para 1" - so 4 pregnancies, 1 live delivery. Until then, not even my mother knew my sister had had 3 abortions.

As for that "Para 1", that would be her first child, my nephew. His father's name is Glenn, but our family doesn't talk about that. Everyone tells my nephew that his father is Geneo, even though my sister hadn't met Geneo until her first child was 4 years old. She left Glenn off his birth certificate, and after she met & married Geneo, she had the birth certificate changed to add Geneo as the father.

The guy from Into The Wild...Christopher McCandless...His father had two families. I just don't get how someone can support (emotionally or monetarily) two families. But then again what's the difference between supporting two families or supporting mistresses with babies?

R134 As I understand it, the McCandless family was/is well-off financially. I'm also guessing that Christopher McCandless didn't get what he needed emotionally or else he wouldn't have run off to Alaska.

My maternal grandfather was a geologist in Alberta working for Standard Oil when by some weird chance he met a guy from RKO Pictures who told him he looked like Clark Gable and should act. So he did. He did not become famous but was in several prominent films as a secondary character. Then he gave it up around age 30 and moved back to Canada to start a family. Why a secret? Because he was known in Hollywood as an eager top and fucked a pretty impressive list of actors (according to my aunt, who says she heard this from her uncle on a trip to New Orleans years before).

r136 Give us names! A couple of Names that would surprise us!!!

I’m obsessed with R11 pic - such a hot couple. I would love to know how the kids turned out. So often the looks are so..specific.

My mother was raped as a child by my grandfather best friend. My great uncle was gay. That 's what I know so far ( my grandmother was a lez but openly living with her gf). My sisters know about my mother's abuse.

My dad was a pilot for Pan Am. As a child my mother always told me " If the doorbell rings and you open it and a young boy tells you he's your brother, let him in, he probably is." They don't call it the cockpit for nothing.

My father had an unusual name and, surprisingly, for a while there was another man with the same name in our town. No relation at all. But for years after he moved away we would get phone calls intended for him. The clue that would give it away was that he was a Marine, and my father was never in the military. About a month after my father died, I got a call from a woman, asking for my father and I told her he had passed. She got angry and insisted that she be allowed to speak with him. I was, naturally, upset, so I repeated that he was deceased and hung up on her. A few minutes later she called back and said, "Please don't hang up. I need to speak with him. He's my father." I told her that she was mistaken, but she wouldn't believe me. She went on and on about how he had had an affair with her mother and then refused to acknowledge or support her, and she had been trying to track him down for years. Again, I told her she had the wrong family but she wouldn't believe me. She said she knew it was hard for me to accept that I had a sister, but that she knew all kinds of details to prove that my father was her father. She said, "I know your mother's name is Joanne." Aha! Not my mom's name. I explained to her that she wanted the other guy with the same name as my father, who used to live in this town years ago. His wife was named Joanne, and over the years my family had received more than one "I'm looking for my biological father" phone calls. She called me a liar and hung up on me...

R141 = liar.

R141 How odd, but I can believe it. My family has an unusual last name (less than 500 people in the US had it in 1950, less than 1,000 have it now), and my father's first name was "Claude". In the 1950s when my father was stationed in Puerto Rico, there was a second "Claude" last name also stationed on the island. They were easily distinguishable in person since one was white, one was black. My dad was born in 1929, the black Claude born in 1927.

R14, my bro-in-law sold some land in a shady deal that was part cash, to avoid paying taxes. He actually buried the cash in the backyard. Unlike usual for him, it wasn’t stolen or destroyed. I did butt-in once and say “Bro, you really should tell your wife where the money is”, and he did.

He’s so incompetent and dishonest that he’s secretive about money. Many of his tax-avoidance money schemes lose money. He doesn’t even always know how much he’s lost, I don’t think.

my mother only had me because she was trying to avoid having to sleep with her own father. so she latched on to an unrelated man who was living under the same roof. she tried to make it work with him for awhile, but told me she left because he was an adult and she was still a child (only 15) and she needed to be at home with her mother.

on dad's side, i was a "secret shame" baby that wasn't mentioned out loud until my half-brother's mother blurted it out in a school counselor session. having since met that side of the family, i've seen the birth announcements of "our first grandchild and our son's first baby" and everything.

my half brother has told me that the circumstances surrounding my birth almost lead to the break-up of my grandparents. rumour has it that Grandma paid our family to walk away while Grandpa was out of the country for work, and when he got back he hit the roof and said she had robbed him of his grandchild. they basically characterized my mother as some kind of fortune hunter who had to be shaken off before she got the talons in

i find this all very difficult to believe, because i know my family. if money had changed hands, someone would know about it. money was in short supply, and although i am sure they wouldn't have said no, it would have eventually been revealed. everything else in that damned family was. also, my family has working class pride and i can imagine my grandfather driving up and telling them to stuff the money up their asses. he was from Brooklyn, and just that way about things.

on my side, my family basically said that my dad's family felt that they were "too good for us" and that i would probably be disappointed if i met them at their constant looking down their noses. my family may be total trash, but they can sum people up they met 3 times with remarkable accuracy.

I'm adopted, brother is not. I always felt Dad loved him more. One day during an emotionally heightened screaming match between Teen-Me and my mom, she yells at me that my brother is a sperm bank baby and my father shoots blanks. She then tells me to never tell my brother.

My plan was to tell my brother after they were both gone. He fucked that up by dying in a crash (caused by another driver) before they did.

Did you hate your brother, R146?

My great-grandmother paid the mob to kill her last two husbands for their benefits.

R147 no. we had a very complicated relationship and were rarely close, but we turned a corner the last time we saw each other and I looked forward to getting closer to him. Then...fate.

When she got looped on boozed and pills, Mama made my sisters and me perform "You Gotta Have a Gimmick" from Gypsy, and would beat us if we got the words or choreography wrong.

Also, I like blue.

the pussy was GALORE

My maternal grandmother had a husband and kids. Then she left them and married my grandfather and moved to another state with him and had a bunch of kids with him. This was back in the late 30s. My mother told me this as proof of what a cunt my grandmother was.

I found a post-it note at my dad’s house that said “blow-jobs Joe 555-1212”.

Oh, I'll play. Between being a younger sibling and a nosy one eavesdropping on everyone, and also the one that did all the genealogy and DNA shit, I know a fair amount.

I found out a few years ago that my father has another kid out there. That son and my brother were born within a few months of each other. I believe he knew about the kid and either turned his back on him or gave the mother a sum of money and THEN turned his back. I know my half brother's name, where he lives, what he does for a living, and every few months I look at his Facebook page. But I am too afraid to send him a message, as he may be completely uninterested. My father is in the throes of dementia so asking him is not an option.

My (full) brother's wife, who used to LOVE LOVE LOVE to send me born again paraphernalia when I came out about finding Jesus and casting aside sin, has had not one not two not three but FOUR abortions. I wondered why they were rushing to get married if she wasn't PG, but apparently she gave him an ultimatum, and she and my brother got married so the next time he knocked her up, she didn't have to get scraped again.

That same brother has also been accused by an old friend of my sister's of rape.

(My poor mom. She was truly a saint.)

Found out from a cousin a few years ago that there was some kind of coroner inquest into my grandmother's death. I didn't get all the details but I guess there's a possibility my father and his siblings sort of gently helped Granny (one assumes at her request) on that final journey. Nothing came of it but I still wonder.

Going back a few generations:

My great grandmother and great grandfather had my grandfather, then apparently broke up, never divorced but married other people. (It was the early 1900s and apparently it wasn't the hardest thing in the world to do that if you moved a lot and/or used variations on a name.)

A great uncle had 5 kids. He was not a good guy, and apparently couldn't keep his zipper shut, and the mother wasn't great either. She took the 5 kids (all sons) to her new boyfriend's, and he promptly beat the shit out of them, landing them in the hospital. The state took them away and adopted them all out, and from what I have heard from cousins who tried to reach out, none of them had anything resembling a great life. Then that great uncle learned in the 70s that he had a kid he'd fathered in WWII overseas, too. What a winner.

We're pretty certain that my 3x great grandfather knocked up his own daughter, which resulted in my great-great grandmother. Her sibling, father unknown, shot himself and his wife and made front page headlines.

A distant cousin was killed by a jealous ex husband in the early 80s. He was dating the man's ex wife and lost his shit.

That's about 8 or 9 Lifetime movies right there, right?

Then why would you want to tell him something like that? Not judging. Seriously curious, R149.

My great-aunt was institutionalised in the 1920s and lived there until the 1970s. She probably had schizophrenia. She would have been in her twenties when the institutionalisation happened. Before WW1, she went on holiday to France (she lived in Scotland) and met a French boy. They corresponded for years even though, of course, the war was going on. In 1918 when it was all over she received a letter from him telling her he was coming to Scotland to see her, but he never arrived. We speculate he may have died in the 1918 influenza pandemic. Later on she had some accident with a horse and carriage, was either kicked by the horse or struck in the chest somehow. Whether either of these things had a part to play in her worsening mental state, who knows.

She was a secret kept by that generation of the family, perhaps because, back then, people didn't want to marry into families with those kinds of illnesses. My father's cousin remembers her own mother making a package of clothes and gifts every Christmas for "an old lady in the hospital". My father never knew about his aunt until the 1970s, when, as a junior doctor, he was contacted by the institution as she was nearing her end.

On my mother's side of the family, my maternal grandfather didn't have a secret that I know of but he was the secret. He was the illegitimate son of a Protestant man and a Catholic woman, born in the rural North of Ireland in the 1910s. His mother kept him and raised him as a single mother, very unusual for the time, especially given the circumstances. His father's brothers had pressured him to break off the relationship with his mother. That family were very proper, upright, churchy people. My grandfather would sometimes talk about taking his family (ie my mother and her siblings) to the local Gospel hall so they could all sit in the front row while members of his father's family were preaching about proper, upright living. My grandmother, his wife, talked him out of it. Probably for the best, but I would have been tempted to do it myself.

My father's paternal grandmother used to help young girls who were "in trouble" as they used to say. Evidently her husband was fine with it -It supplemented their income nicely -until one time she "helped" herself. He moved into the spare room and they never shared a bed again, but remained married to the end.

R154 because people deserve their truth. I might have changed my mind (and now we'll never know) but I think he had a right to know.

Last year, my half sister bagan to suspect that her father ins't really her dad. This came about when she met our bio mom for the first time, after being abandoned by her when she was 7 months old, and wanted to do a DNA test so she could see what nationalities she was. Bio Mom flipped her shit and tried to talk her out of the test, causing my sister's Spidey senses to tingle. That's not the best secret, though...

Bio Mom brought some family photos to their first meeting and my sister zeroed in on a photo of Bio Mom's stepfather and some of his family members. His niece is a dead ringer for my sister's daughter.

My sister immediately rushed to do her DNA sample and had her supposed half-brother also do one. As expected, they did not match as relatives, nor did she match to any other of her dad's family. She is most likely the product of our bio mother and her stepfather.

Secret secrets are no fun

Secret secrets hurt someone

I see those typos, so I'll "Oh, dear!" myself now.

[quote] I know my half brother's name, where he lives, what he does for a living, and every few months I look at his Facebook page. But I am too afraid to send him a message, as he may be completely uninterested.

R153, great post, that's a lot in your family history. Did all the craziness happen on your mom's side, your dad's side, or both sides? If it didn't happen on your dad's side, I'd be curious about your half brother (same dad).

Good luck, R153. I hope you found some happiness in life. I wouldn't blame you if you wanted nothing to do with any member of your family.

After my great grandparents got married, my great grandmother invited her sister to live with the couple. My great grandfather had 9 kids with my great grandmother. During this time, he also had 5 kids with her sister....while they were all living together. We're not sure at what point my great grandmother figured it out. (It must have been similar to Maria Shriver's epiphany...times five.) She divorced his ass. Within a few months, my great grandfather married my great grandmother's sister. They had five more kids. These five later kids had their dad's last name, but the first five were raised with their mother's maiden name. My great grandfather also had fathered a child in France during World War I, so he had a grand total of 20 kids. After the divorce, my great-grandmother went on to marry a nice man, and they adopted and raised a toddler.

Surprisingly, my grandmother maintained a good relationship with her father, and my dad grew up with tons of cousins, many whom he rarely saw (for obvious reasons).

My brother slept with children. My family deals with pain by laughing at all his supporters who bought his music as he was touching their kids. HAHAHA!

My sister faked having a baby at age 50 in order to get out of her work obligations.

I'm not even going to tell you what she did when she actually got pregnant.

The true relationship between my Grandfather and "Aunt Muriel."

Old sins cast long shadows.

I have a cousin who is a Trumpster and pro life. So is her family and her mother. Little does she know that her mother (my Aunt) was with my grandmother when she had a back alley abortion probably in the 1940s or 50s. My grandma actually had two abortions.

I've found that most overly religious and conservative people are the ones that have had 8 abortions.

R168 My cousin would flip out if she knew her mother was with my grandmother (her sister) while she was having illegal abortions. Their whole family is pro Trump, pro gun, pro life 1%-ers.

Some of these stories assembled would make a great soap opera which would be number one on TV.

My family is dull, dull, dull.

R171, i doubt that.

you just aren't the Family Historian and aren't in the loop about things. every family has shit under the rug--EVERY!!

you need to find that person that has gone and done the on-the-ground research and talk to them. they know everything. for some reason, they ask questions and they get answers. they are usually someone who is not right in the thick of things themselves, and kind of an outsider within their own family and more independent. i believe this is why the rest feel it is safe to disclose to this person--they feel that person hasn't already "take a side" and won't be automatically against them.

if everyone says that there's nothing to know, then i would assume there is something very BIG under the rug. so big that perhaps it was kept even from other family members. but someone knows. this is why it is important to forge relationships with old aunts, etc. they know the scoop.

R161 That was a very kind thing to say. Thank you.

The fuckery, so to speak, is on both sides of the family.

I am content and have happiness and love in my life. I'm very grateful for that. It took a lot of patience and some good therapy to get there! I love/loved my parents. My father is not a bad man, but I will say, and don't think I am being mean to say so, he wasn't a very savvy one. He made some bad choices, as we all have. But he came out of a home riddled with alcoholism and abuse, and for him to be as decent a human being as he is? I think is remarkable.

I care about my siblings but keep them at arms' length. We were never close and my life took me in a very different direction.

My great-grandparents had an arranged marriage. They’re Italian from the turn of the century. But they raised 8 children and were a very happy family.

My great-grandmother was age 12 when she was married.

My mom told me after my dad died 5 years ago that he had asked her for a divorce when my brother was 8 and I was 1. He was a DOD aerospace engineer and was having an affair with his secretary. She told him sure but pointed out that they’d both have their security clearances pulled and probably never work again professionally. He stayed and they were married 72 years. She never told anyone, especially my grandfather who would have taken care of things differently, I’m sure.

My father was bi. He never knew that I knew.

Mother had an affair. Father had an affair. Grandfather had an affair. Sister had an abortion in HS The fact that oldest sister was adopted was kept secret for decades. Nephew possibly not his dead father's son. Brother in law attempted to kill other brother in law with car. Brother in law attempted affair with his sister in-law. Father pulled gun on mother. Mother attempted suicide when father threatened to leave her. Father's parents refused to talk to mother's parents because of a shared family secret involving a drowning Uncle an alcoholic, distant uncle a murderer who committed suicide

R178 That sounds like the first ten years of As The World Turns!

We were a middle class family, but In the 1980's my father was a gold smuggler. During the time I guess we were wealthy, but I was age 5-12 and didn't really know. He was a high school chemistry teacher, quit and started his own business buying gold and silver in bulk from pawn shops, dentists, and from computer equipment like keyboards. He had a factory with a "smelter" (?) and made gold and silver bricks out of the random metal.

I went to his "warehouse" when I was 9 and it was a huge factory, with a pile of old terminal keyboards like 60 feet high. I would help strip the gold out, junk the rest. So the interesting part, that I learned in my 30's, is that he worked with the Canadian Mafia to smuggle the gold from Connecticut to Toronto, then Quebec, and the to France, where he it was used to make jewelry. No idea why this was so illegal, but Uncle Frank (I grew up with his kids) was actually a quite famous Italian mobster.

Looking back, there were guns everywhere - I mean everywhere - like under the sofa, in the glove compartment etc. I remember my fathers glove compartment always having a pistol, a bottle of whiskey, and lots and lots of antacids, like Tums and Mylanta. I guess it was stressful. There was also always large gold bricks - like from Fort Knox, in our trunk, like groceries - no big deal.

Anway, after about 7 years of that, in 1984, the price of gold plummeted, one my fathers delivery guys took a van literally full of gold bricks and disappeared to Europe, never to be seen again. My dad ended up owing the IRS 2 million bucks and went back to teaching high school chemistry. We became poor. One day the IRS came to the house at 9am and took all three cars, just drove them away, and they seized and auctioned off our house. We had a lake house, but when we went there, it had also been seized, even though it was in my Uncle's name. My older brother was a fancy boarding school and was kicked out.

Back then, we were told our father was a "precious metal broker" but much later I learned the truth. He wouldn't watch the show Breaking Bad, because he said it was depressing. Parents are still alive, he teaches Chemistry at community college, and they bounced back financially, but it was a rough childhood for me and my siblings. I moved to 7 different school between 10 and 15, and became a juvenile delinquent and was in jail by 16, but straightened my life out and went to college and have a normal life now. Looking back, there were a million signs of the criminal aspect, but I was just a kid.

My mother refuses to even talk about that entire period of our lives. We were quite wealthy and had all that crap - and poof - it was gone. She tells me there were never ever any guns, gold, or Uncle Franks in our house ever, but everyone else isn't in denial. Father never went to jail, it was just an IRS thing, but he paid for years and years, until 2010 I think.

When I was a kid, one day my father drove us to the hospital to visit his sister. He said she had broken her arm. He left us kids out in the car while he went inside the hospital. Many years later I recognized the scenery from the freeway and realized that my aunt was really in a mental hospital in Camarillo. She had gotten divorced and I think it drove her into a mental tailspin.

A story on the flip side: when my dad died, about 150 total strangers came to his funeral. We were shocked and unprepared, but most were people he had secretly helped at one time or another. He was a high-school teacher and later college professor, and they were ex-students who told us stories of how he had bought their textbooks, paid rent, bought meals, and found them scholarships and jobs etc. Considering how penny pinching he was at home, we had pretty mixed feelings about it. I (and my siblings) ended up with about 50 business cards from strangers all asking us to look them up if I ever needed help.

R86 i love your pacing. Great story. Thanks for sharing it

I'd say it's more of an open secret, but my aunt's ex husband robbed my grandparents of 20.000$ that was locked in a save, and he knew where the save was because he worked for my grandpa for a while. Some people in the family know about it, but my cousins and even my aunt still try to claim it was someone else, despite there being a lot of evidence against the ex husband (police tracked his phone back then and he was near my grandparents house, the people who went with him had the same accent as him as my uncle described it, fingerprints were found) however, the police ruled it as a "family affair" for some fucking reason, and that was it. My grandparents didn't want the hassle and just let it go.

Now this was about 15 years ago, and after it happened, my mom, grandparents and I didn't see my aunt, her ex husband or my cousins for about 5 years. In about 2010 we got in contact again, and basically the following years no one spoke about it (I was a bit younger and didn't even know about any of it) but about 4 years ago I confronted my cousin about it, and she said that there was enough evidence to suggest that it wasn't him. She never provided this evidence, of course.

So basically, everyone knows about it and since then my grandpa has passed away and my grandma is still in contact with my aunt, because she still loves her daughter. I feel bad for her. And I am going to try to get this case reopened somehow in the future. My grandma deserves to get justice, she's been through enough.

R148 she’s an icon. Hope she lived high on the hog.

No suprise that over half the stories here comprise of men raping vulnerable women (often relatives( or marrying them impregnating underage women.

- My great great grandmother regularly smuggled gold from Italy into the U.S. She was eventually caught but never charged for some reason. - My great aunt's husband was a horse trainer (circa 1930's) who's clients were a wealthy group from Pittsburgh. He had an affair with the daughter of one of his clients and it ended in her murder and his suicide. - Schizophrenia runs in my family, so does depression

i am from a family, quite literally, of small-time drug dealers. the kind who live in a dilapidated shack of a house because it's strategically in someone else's name.

granted, most of the actual dealers were the menfolk that the women in our family married into, but the women become a part of the family business and are vital to it. one even took the rap when they came to bust her husband, and is a convicted felon over it.

i remember bouncing on my mom's bed at about 4 y.o. and asking her the origins of humankind. she was in "the Closet" measuring out baggies, and giving me the God&Jesus shpiel, a rifle propped against the wall at her side.

we were affiliated with, or authorized by, the local (infamous--you HAVE heard the name)biker outlet. i went to the clubhouse and played dolls with the head dude's grandaughter. i also heard rumour of his son-in-law, the enforcer and a visitor to our house, was the one they sent to hospitals with flowers to threaten people into staying quiet and other things. people we knew tangentially were massacred in their house, including a baby in a crib. i never i did find out whether any of these things were associated with us or what we did.

i was literally the waitress in the house. they trained me up to empty ashtrays, take orders for drinks and coffee and so on. i could roll a joint by the time i was 3 just from observing it so many times. cutting lines was nothing.

oddly, i grew up without any desire to do drugs, or seriously smoke or drink (only light socially on the latter). the family also insulated me in other ways. i once hitched a ride from a group of men whom i had med before at a family barbecue, thinking that they were "safe" but looking back it seems that they planned to take me somewhere and gang rape me. until i saw my uncle, another dealer, on the street we were driving on and said "there's my uncle". they let me out with the quickness! thanks, Uncle Meth Dealer.

also, my family wouldn't even let my friends in school buy weed from them. i and my friends were off-limits. everyone in the family smoked, drank and more than half did drugs but i was not really allowed or encouraged to follow them into that lifestyle.

R187 it kinda sounds real to me.

My family was the suburban mess depicted at R153 but my older siblings were all involved with, shall we say, sales and distribution. It was the 70s, mind you, but still. My brother got into a jam when a deal went bad and someone took both the 20K his upline dealer was expecting and the drugs, so my parents had to cough up that money.

Clearly not quite on the scope of what you're talking about but still, sounds real-ish to me.

We stole cable tv growing up.

R187, your story sounds believable to me, especially the waitress part. My family (not drug dealers) turned the young ones into waitresses (emptying ash trays, making sandwiches) as well.

R180, if you're still around, usually, I can't read a long story like that, but yours was very interesting. I guess your Dad had enough assets to stay out of jail. Whew!

When my grandmother died, the estate was supposed to be split among the grandchildren. My under (her son) was the executor. My mother was, but she died a few years earlier. The estate went to probate and my sister and I got ZERO. My uncle had borrowed the money to keep his business running and lost it. So we were told we were all Shit Out of Luck. A year later I found out one cousin got my grandmother's Jersey shore house (worth about $400K) for $100,000, which was split between her two bothers. My sister and I....got nothing. I sued. I took him to court for me and my sister. He died while discovery and such was going on. He was a heavy smoker who also chewed nicotine gum and wore nicotine patches. He lost his business prior to that.

My sister died a few years later and my aunt had the balls to come to the funeral and then to my sisters house to "take bacK" family items. I threw her out -- like my niece and nephew weren't family? We don't speak. I wouldn't piss in their collective ass if their guts were on fire.

under=uncle

R191, something similar happened in my family. After 90-something great-grandfather died, he left behind cash, property, and stocks. He left behind four children, and he made his only son, the youngest child and a spoiled asshole, the executor of his estate. The probate phase took more than five years. When he finally did get around to giving his siblings cash, the amount was much smaller than what was expected. Meanwhile he had bought himself a full set of dental implants and a new car. His sisters let him get away with it, because the family had been used to yielding to him for 60 years.

r190, I'm still around. Sorry so long, I didn't even get it into some weirder aspects, but I think a general theme on this thread is kids growing up in sketchy criminal families, and just being dragged around for the ride, and then processing it later. Kids don't really know whats going on.

My father and I would drive around the Southern USA every summer in a green Ford Econoline rapist van. He set up a little television in the back for me, and I would eat candy while he drove around from city to city collecting 50 gallon drums of gold and silver items. We would eat at little Mom and Pop places along the way, hit New Orleans and eat Oysters, and then we got home, my whole family would dig through these 50 gallon drums and pick out a favorite piece. I collected silver cigarette cases, my sister would find some old lady bracelet, etc. So it wasn't all bad. Many stories on here seem much worse to me.

The IRS thing and my father staying out of jail was because what he was doing was illegal in US, Canada, and France, and I think at the time, there was no enforcement or cooperation. The kinda people my father was involved with weren't the type to snitch. The IRS noticed the money though.

I never knew there WAS a Canadian Mafia until a few years ago, and "Uncle Frank" was a prototypical Mafia character. He was a nice guy though. People who know me don't believe me when I tell them this stuff. I was in a serious lockup in PA at 16, but later went to college and started teaching. My wife knows my family, so she can verify my story, but honestly, I've only told maybe 4 people in my life, close friends. It's all too weird.

The other theme though is denial. My brother, sister and father are all willing to admit what was going on. My mother refuses to acknowledge and calls us all "crazy" and making up stories.

Also, last story, my uncle owns about 400 apartments in a university town, and my brother and I were doing work for him and was using his car, we opened the trunk, and inside were hundreds - and I mean hundreds - of women's panties. Used, all sizes and shapes. HE's the normal one in my father's family.

Thanks, R194.

[quote] The other theme though is denial. My brother, sister and father are all willing to admit what was going on. My mother refuses to acknowledge and calls us all "crazy" and making up stories.

That's normal. There's always at *least* one person like your mom: delusional, in La-La Land.

My uncle’s first two wives died of mushroom poisoning. The third one died of a broken neck.

She wouldn’t eat her mushrooms.

r180/r194, were you from Meriden, CT? I have a lot of distant cousins there who are more recent immigrants from Italy than my family is and there have been whispers about them.

We're a little Jewy on grandmother's side. But don't talk about it.

We're a little Nazi on grandfather's side. But don't talk about it.

My Italian grandfather ran liquor in New York and then up and down the California coast during prohibition. I think he was a mobster. My father denies it. My grandfather died when he was only 47. My father says it was from a heart attack. I think it was a mob murder.

This thread is fascinating!

My maternal grandfather-whom my mother never mentioned-insisted on calling my grandmother by his best friend’s name.

Oddly enough, she never objected.

Good job, R202! You win for creepiest story so far! I take it his best friend was male? What did he call the best friend then or did he call them both the same name so that, as he was screaming out during sex, it was fine either way?

^The friend’s name was ‘Jim’. According to my grandmothet-and we loathed one another-her husband told her over breakfast one morning, that she reminded him of his best friend, Jim, and that’s what he was going to call her.

I was so horrified and repulsed by this story that i never asked for gory details.

And I forget to mention that the best friend was a dead guy.

"According to my grandmothet-and we loathed one another"--I like you already.

r197 At the time we lived in Cheshire for a few years, before that Danbury. We moved around a lot, for no apparent reason at the time, but later we figured it out. AND...I just googled and yes, Cheshire is right next to Meridan. I have really fond memories of that place, growing up early 80's arcades, riding bikes everywhere.

R202, R203 and R204 – that’s weird and eccentric. In fact, it’s downright strange and definitely worthy of comment - but I don’t see what’s so disgusting, horrifying or dirty about it. People used to be a lot more eccentric than they are now and had all sorts of weird habits. Other people shrugged them off; Americans used to be a lot more accepting of eccentricity.

OK I got one, second hand. My ex-boyfriend's story, really, but he died so I'll share it. He said when he was growing up in the Bronx, his mother wrapped her used tampons in toilet paper and neatly lined them up on the tub. I asked all of the follow-up questions and still have no more information than that.

My aunt married her husband just so he could get citizenship. He turned out to be gay and died of AIDS. Only found out in the past five years from my mother and he's been dead for some time.

Oh Boy, where do I start? My fathers sister was a total slut. Her husband was bi-sexual and having a long term relationship with his best friend. Both men were very attractive and my aunt was jealous of her husband. One evening they had a party (my parents were among the guests). My aunt got really drunk and she came onto her husbands lover. He rebuffed her advances and tried to laugh it off. She I guess would not take no for an answer. My uncles friends wife told her to back off and tried to leave. My aunt falling down drunk announced to the entire group her husband and his friend were lovers. Shocked silence until my father picked his sister up and carried her over his shoulder from the room, kicking and screaming. My mother told me this story years later after they had both died. Both men stayed married and continued their relationship with each other. Both men died in the 80's of what I am sure was AIDS.

Not really a secret if it was announced in front of an entire party, R210.

R210 - the way I read your summation, your mom didn't tell you until after both your uncle and aunt had died, and also the other man had died as well. If that's correct, and you think both men died of AIDS, do you think your aunt died of AIDS tool? And what about the other man's wife?

That's correct my mom didn't tell me until my all parties had been dead for years. My Aunt died of old age at 91. I have no idea about the other man's wife. My mother had a few other interesting stories to tell. As children us kids had no idea what a scandalous lives our parents led. All good middle class Christians.

My dad's best friend came onto me when I was 17. He was drunk and it freaked me out! He was pretty hot, rugged and very masculine. I got to see his big uncut cock when he came out of the shower naked on a hunting trip. I should have but I didn't, I was still very deep in the closet in high school.

I never told a soul...

We worked for a southern circus back then. My childhood was spent with freaks as my friends and my family worshiped the cash made at night.

My female cousin had a wild youth and was married three times by the age of 30. The third marriage took and she has two adult daughters. However, they know nothing about her first two marriages or the fact that she is much older than she claims to be. Also that she had a son she gave up for adoption at age 17. I feel weird knowing this and not telling them but it's not my secret to share.

I have two cousins that are convicted murders one blew his stepfather's face off and when he got out of prison went to his ex-girlfriend's house and shot her, her husband, and their small daughter, the other shot and killed his ex-girlfriend her small daughter was there but thankfully she was unharmed at least physically.

My cousin molested my sister. My parents know, and his parents know and had been dealt with as much as possible. My sister didn't say anything until years later when she was a teenager and everyone had a sit down and basically confirmed it. We could call it a secret, no one would really expect to be privy to that info.

We knew what he meant, R17. Geez.

A little over 1/3 of the posters on this thread I have blocked in the past. Don’t like really mean people. That strongly reinforces for me the deep psychological damage and trauma that families can inflict on their children.

My great, great grandfather murdered his father in a dispute over land, and fled from Georgia to Florida. Officially the crime was never solved.

More secrets please.

Grace Jones grandfather is her father.

Thanks for sharing R221, we're all so much wiser now because of your post.

Uncle Nunzio's goat wasn't exactly a pet.

My wife's two aunts conned their Father to change his will late in life. Their kids never had to work. My wife's life has been wonderful and probably better because she did have a job she loved, but the family dynamics were strained because of it.

My Dad had one sibling who married and started a family about 15 or so years before he did. His oldest niece was like his first daughter. She married a guy from Venezuela in the early to mid 60s. My dad blew a gasket that she married a N word and never spoke to her again. She divorced and married another man from Asia and has a child from each marriage. I got to know her when we both moved 3k miles away. Her last husband was a racist, right wing, homophobic, gun loving nut job and she voted for trump. My dad ditched her because he lost respect for her and I did as well but for very different reasons. My father's bigotry really impacted our family's relations. Oddly enough he was OK with my being lesbian.

My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents are all FAT.

None of them have ever been serious about getting in shape.