My younger DSis one night when she couldn’t sleep, decided to start a search on one of those ancestry websites. We have a tiny family, it’s just me, my DSis and our grown up kids now, my mother died in 2007. About six months later, an alert pops up stating someone is looking for details about my mother. One of my aunts who I have not seen since I was tiny got in touch. Rather than answer a lot of questions, it just made us ask more, we inadvertently opened a can of worms. My mother, from the age of 16 to 25 years old had five boys, all under the age of 7, lived in a caravan with an extremely abusive and violent husband, she upped and disappeared, we never knew any of this. Her father banished her from the family because she had left her husband and children. Then found out her ex-husband was up on a rape charge and arson with intent to endanger life some years ago with at least one of the sons, got a long stretch inside for it. My mother never saw any of her family again, and she came from a large family.
Just to confuse matters, my birth certificate does not have a father on it, but my sister’s does, the name being the man I always called dad. Now appears my mum could have been pregnant with me already, the man I called dad was a bit older than my mum and helped her get away. I guess what I am saying is that my sister and I are half sisters, not full sisters as we had been led to believe.
The long and short of it is my sister and I have decided not to approach that side of the family anymore, we are happy as we are and are very close.
Imagine though, living in a caravan with five boys under the age of 7 or 8 and an abusive violent husband and getting no help from your family, and in fact, them cutting off all contact with you, I just wish she had told us while she was still alive, perhaps she didn’t know how to tell us.