Like so many of us who are researching our families' histories, I've come across events and/or documents that I am sure the subject family member thought, at the time, could be kept under wraps. In my case, most of these relatives have long since gone to meet their maker, so there's not much to be said, other than to share my find with a favorite cousin, and marvel at the things we didn't know.
However, recently, and by that I mean in the last few months, I've come across a couple of discoveries that have popped up on Ancestry as a result of continuing efforts to digitize and index public records. The first is the marriage record for my husband's father and step-mother. They met and married about 15 months after my husband's mother had passed away. There was some acrimony about their rush to marry, but eventually everyone just sucked it up and shut up.
We flew to Texas with our young children in January 1993 to attend their afternoon ceremony held at a local Lutheran church. It would be the first time we would meet the adult children and the families of the woman my father-in-law was marrying. Her older daughter hosted a nice reception afterwards in her home. Their marriage lasted until 2010 when my father-in-law was taken by lung cancer. We continue to have a good relationship with his widow who is now 87.
To my surprise, I recently found a marriage record that this couple actually married a month prior to the ceremony we attended. I've no idea why, and it doesn't really matter. Perhaps taxes? I've only mentioned this to my husband, and have no intention of asking my mother-in-law about it, but I am somewhat amused by their innocent deceit being exposed at this late date.
The second situation worries me a bit more. My parents divorced when I was a child and my father had a second family, none of whom I knew until I was an adult (another story, another time). The oldest (half) brother is a sweet man who made sure my father was cared for in his later years, and he is the patriarchal figure for all the family in the town where they live. He and I still talk on the phone every few months. Prior to my dad's death in 2006, my brother was contacted by a young woman claiming to be his daughter. My brother had been friends with the girl's mother many years earlier, and even acknowledged a physical relationship, before she relocated to another state. At the time he was contacted though, it seemed he was unaware that he had a child. And so he began a relationship with her and her young family, and she eventually moved her family back to the same town where he lives. And now, for reasons unknown to me, they are estranged. :(
So it shocked me when recently, Ancestry coughed up a marriage certificate for him and the girl's mother (now deceased) from the state where she had relocated. I can only believe this marriage was for the benefit of the child's birth, and I don't know whether there was a subsequent divorce. There's so much I want to know about this, but feel it's not my place to pry into this very sensitive issue, so I'll stay mum about this too. Maybe one day he'll confide the details to me. If not, that's OK too.
In one way, it makes me sad that it's becoming harder to keep our so-called private lives private, without fear of exposing ourselves to society's harsh judgments.
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