@BlackAzizAnansi My bio great-grandparents' (on my mother's side) last name was Cole. But that's only because after murdering a prominent farmer in Alabama, my g-grandfather married my g-grandmother, took her family name (Cole), & together, they absconded to TX. They both lived a long life--he was never caught or punished. #FamilySecrets
@BlackAzizAnansi My cousin passed away during childbirth and her younger sister adopted her daughter. Daughter had no idea she was adopted until her adopted mother passed away last year. I guess it's not a secret anymore but it was for 21 long years!
@BlackAzizAnansi a distant relative from 🇷🇺 shot his daughter's teacher! Can't remember what his reasoning was, but he just told me at an uncle's wedding party as if it was a totally normal thing to do.
@BlackAzizAnansi my great-great-grandfather always snuck a few potatoes into the plant he was working at. He gave them to starving forced laborers. That doesn't make him a good person though, he was still a nazi collaborator
@BlackAzizAnansi My ancestor Ellen, my namesake, was divorced....in 1880. In Mississippi. From a man who led a murdering group in the Vicksburg Massacre.
@BlackAzizAnansi My great-grandma was Native American, but even she didn’t know from which people, because she’d been “adopted” by a white couple that never told her anything about where she came from. That white couple kept changing their names and put a different state of origin on every census they filled out. We had a genealogist try to find where they’d come from and she couldn’t. She was like, “Well, they were clearly hiding from something.” Anyway my great-grandma was probably kidnapped
@greene@BlackAzizAnansi One of my great-grandmas was also "adopted" away from her Oglala Sioux people by a white family circa 1900. Kidnapped and parents murdered, I assume. I have a hand-beaded leather pouch that she was allowed to keep. I was told her birth name was Tekoah but I suspect this is not true because that is a Hebrew-origin word. Her white abductors may have given her multiple names.
@BlackAzizAnansi we found out this fall that I have an older brother who was adopted out. He found our aunt through ancestry dna. My dad didn’t even know about him as the mom never told him. My dad died last year and that’s the most heartbreaking part of it because he’s absolutely have wanted to be in his life as much as possible. I can’t wait to get to meet him and my “new” nephews.
@BlackAzizAnansi my mother had a sister, older than her, who ran away from home at age 18. Nobody had seen or heard from her since. My generation often wondered about her, but then we found out that she was extremely abusive towards her siblings, a bit of a sadist, and the reason nobody talked about her was that she was so reviled everyone was relieved when she finally ran away.
@BlackAzizAnansi My dad grew up believing his grandpa was an undocumented Irish blacksmith who was hiding from the IRA. Nope, Virginian who ran a foundry for the Confederate Army, ran away up North after the war. Learned the real story from relatives he discovered from Ancestry DNA.
@BlackAzizAnansi Not really a secret just sad and nobody talks about it. My aunt kidnapped my grandma who was in late stage dementia, to manipulate her into leaving her inheritance to my aunt. Nobody knew where they were hiding until someone in the family hired a PI. When they were tracked down, the PI was met at the edge of the property by someone brandishing a gun, and the investigation ended there. My mom didn't know her mom had passed away until years after it happened
@BlackAzizAnansi My grandma was a single mother working as a nurse in LA, but got some money from marrying the guy who invented the little plastic clamp tool that helps people open jars. Guess it was enough to corrupt my aunt and cause a lot of grief in my mom's family
@BlackAzizAnansi
During the second world war my uncle whilst on military duty had a non-platonic relationship with a priest in [redacted] who later became the archbishop of [redacted] and travelled half way round the world to attend my uncles funeral over fifty years later.
@BlackAzizAnansi
-My uncle had sex with her cousin on her wedding day.
-A now deceased relatively known politician is actually one of my grandfather's illegitimate children.
-Said grandfather who was an atheist and culturally christian found out in his old age that he was himself the illegitimate child of a Jewish tailor that he saw once a year as a kid.
@BlackAzizAnansi My youngest aunt isn't my grandfather's child. Ancestry DNA kits for Christmas made it a not so Merry Christmas. We never told grandpa before he died (he was 90...he didn't need to know), and nobody is crazy enough to bring it up to grandma.
@BlackAzizAnansi oh shit I got a better one. One aunt of mine got pregnant as a teenager (unfortunately common that side of the family) and abandoned her newborn baby in a shopping cart. It was in the news when this happened. That person is still alive. Not the same side of the family as the mafiosi.
@BlackAzizAnansi Some man in the family abandoned his wife and remarried in Australia so now we have a line of family over there. Not really a secret in the family though.
Also one of those Aussie relatives moved back here and married one of the U.S. relatives. 🥴
@BlackAzizAnansi Whitey Bulger's lieutenant Kevin Weeks broke both arms of an uncle for running numbers to the Italians. Years later, said associate showed up at my grandmother's wake and was visibly upset that the bouquet his people sent wasn't made the center-piece there. Dude was just dressed in khakis, a polo shirt, and a gold-buttoned blazer like he was on his way to a country club.
@BlackAzizAnansi We don't have secrets so much as quirky parts. One I think I've mentioned before is that my great-grandfather on my maternal grandmother's side was VP of the Spanish tobacco company in the Philippines and had two daughters out of wedlock whom my grandmother tried to locate for years, but what with the SCW and WWII it became impossible.
@BlackAzizAnansi My dad had a prior marriage before he met my mom that I didn't know about til he told me, when I was 18. I have to assume my mom knew about this but no one ever mentioned it. And then, after the conversation in which he acknowledged this woman existed, we never really spoke of it again. I don't even know her name. It's a classic case of White People Emotional Repression (TM).
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