Forgotten people, assumed names, secrets and mysteries

[BigPantsOnFire]

I apologise in advance for what may be a slightly odd post; I have been mulling over several connected things over the last few days and so rather than there being one specific story or topic, I'm looking to have more of a wide ranging discussion with anyone who is interested- and possibly hear similar stories.

The other day, I was poking around on one of genealogy sites, having forked out for a month's subscription. Once I had looked at my own family for a bit, I got bored and found myself wondering what I could look into next.

So I thought of Robin. Growing up, my father had a friend he had met when he was at University who used to come and stay with us. He was an oddball, and the joke in my family was that if you dared to mention his name, he would telephone within the day and come for a visit. He never gave away any details about where he lived, or if he had any sort of personal life, or extended family. There was always some sort of eccentric mission that would explain his need to visit the area. We knew his name, and we had a very brief back story (from a vaguely aristocratic line, his father was a vicar with a private 'living' on an estate somewhere in England, where he had grown up).

The last contact we had with him was around the time that my father was dying in 2009. Unfortunately, he rang repeatedly and badgered my mother- telling her that she had to take him to a specific specialist who he had researched. She ended up yelling at him and hanging up.
We never had any way of contacting him, aside from a 'mail drop' sort of situation, care of the University that he still had a link to.

Anyway. I had always been curious about him- and his name was so unusual that I thought that it would be extremely easy to find him or his aristocratic family on the genealogy site.

But there was no result for that name: or, there was, for a different spelling, but only one- for a wedding. I knew he had been married once, and all the other details fit, so I searched with the new spelling. Still nothing. Idly, I searched the Web in general- and got a hit in a Guardian article.

It turned out, he had died in a nursing home in the city I was living at the time. Not only that- the entire premise of the story was that when he had died, the home had discovered that he was living under an assumed name- a different one to the one we knew. The police were called in to establish his identity. Eventually, they were able to do so. It turned out that he was actually from Italy, and had fled with his mother in 1939. His father stayed behind and died in Auschwitz. (Before that, his mother remarried- one could assume that she thought he was already dead).

My DH remarked that he thought that a lot of people reinvented themselves in order to deal with the trauma of WW2. I think he's probably right- and of course in those days and until very recently there were far fewer ways to be found out. In a wider sense, I can't help thinking about all the people who live on only in random anecdotes (we have a couple in my family that probably date back to the 1880s that I might be the last to tell, for example). Genealogy sites really only give you the basics- and so much falls between the cracks, so how can you possibly ever really know who someone was?

I would be fascinated to hear any similar stories, if you have them- or even your random crazy family stories that will be forgotten after you.

My great grandmother was adopted. The story was that her father was a doctor but that both her parents died when she was 4 or 5 and she went to a children’s home in Leeds. She was later adopted by her mother’s friends.
Except… the only item we have that is supposed to have belonged to her father is a tailor’s thimble. We contacted the group which has the records of the children’s home she said she was placed in and they had no records of her. We also have two birth certificates in different names, and a letter addressed to my great grandfather saying that no birth certificate in GGM’s name could be found but these two were the closest matches.
She apparently always maintained that my grandfather was born extremely prematurely and had to be carried around on a silk cushion as he was too delicate to be touched. He was born 12 weeks after they married…
In her married life she spent a lot of money that they didn’t have on fur coats and getting her photo taken at professional photographers’ studios. She tended to rub people up the wrong way by all accounts.
I don’t think we’ll ever know who she really was or who her biological family were.

@vampirethriller, that's a really odd thing to find. I'm sure you'll have already consulted Dr. Google, but just in case you haven't it seems you might be able to get help from the Imperial War Museum as they have records of army children? I might also ask my FIL as he's ex army and does both family and historical military research as a hobby...

@ToughTittyWhompus

That's almost too dreadful to be the plot of a Penny Dreadful. Poor woman, and her poor kids, too.

No birth certificate to be found for my Irish Grandmother, but she wasn’t married to my Grandfather when either of their two sons were born, presumably waiting for his divorce to Come through. The eight children he had never contacted him again as far as I’m aware.
Maternal grandmother eloped from another country at 19, and pregnant with a married Englishman of around 35. They travelled for a few years and arrived in England during the war where she lost her strong accent, and acquired the title Mrs. in fact they didn’t marry until 1962 when Grandad’s first wife died.
Found all this out, and her real name when she died in 2012, aged 99.

@ToughTittyWhompus

My Great Great Grandmother had a tragic life.

Her first husband and baby died within weeks of each other. I was the one that discovered that - my Grandmother had been digging for a while and hadn’t come across that.

She tried to slit her own throat after and was sent to an asylum (late 1890s).

Then she remarried and had 3 more children.

Her husband was a police man who was murdered.

She took the boys and moved 20 miles to the nearest city where she opened a cafe.

That failed after 3 years, and they were destitute.

She begged her sister to take her boys in (10, 7 and 4). But she refused.

A few weeks later, she took the boys and jumped into the river with them.

She died, they survived as a passerby pulled them out. However she was holding the youngest (my Grandmothers father) so there was a bit of a fight between her and the passerby.

It took weeks for her body to be found and they just tossed her in an unmarked paupers grave.

The boys ended up in workhouses, which further added to their trauma.

I also found a huge newspaper article about it all, which my Grandmother hadn’t come across.

It was unbelievably fucking sad.

That is just heartbreaking.

@BonnyEm

I knew someone who came from a poor family in Ireland. Age 15 he signed up for the army with his brothers identification. He lived the rest of his life under his brothers name and all info, used his d.o.b. etc. I never knew any of this until he died. Had no idea the name we had always called him wasn't even him.

What happened to his brother whose identity had been stolen then?

I always think this is the opposite of “the usual story”. My great granny had my grandad when she was 14, not ideal but not uncommon. When rhe 1st world war ended she was 20 and got married to a soldier who had been away for the whole war. They both said he was the father of my grandad and everyone accepted it but didn’t really believe it. It never mattered to any of us. They had 3 more children and were happy. Fast forward more than 100 years and my ds is born with a rare genetic condition passed through the male line. Except one of my grandads sisters had the same condition! He was the dad after all! Or it’s one in billions they both have it and aren’t related. Doesn’t make any difference in reality but interesting that actually the soldier did come back for her.

I know a story about a couple who emigrated to Australia with their child at the turn of the century. One day the wife just disappeared, leaving four children, one of whom was a young baby.

. Their father gave the baby up to be adopted by another family. The two girls were sent back to the UK to live with a maiden Aunt. The eldest son was sent to a military academy in the UK at 14. Their father died not long afterwards and they never saw him again, or their youngest sibling.
Subsequent research suggests the mother had gone back to the UK and started a new life . All the children were traumatised.

The more I have delved into my mother's family the murkier it has seemed. So many compromises under a totalitarian regime and subsequent reinvention.

My father's side has been easier, more innocent, but involving so many migrations where traces have sometimes been left.

You’d probably enjoy Kiss Myself Goodbye, about the author’s eccentric aunt who entirely invented herself

@Unsuremover are you a man? Otherwise if the condition is passed through the male line it is a coincidence right?

Not an ancestor but I have full records of a child who was supposed to have been adopted into my family, but wasn’t . She would be late 60s now and I often wonder if she was adopted by someone else, if she’s had a nice life and what she would have been like as my aunt .

She’d be a different name now and probably never realised she was all set to be adopted by my family as a baby .

No way of ever finding out .

Not assumed identities but I discovered some jaw dropping things in my family.

My gg grandmother had quite a traumatic life, though lived to a serene old age herself. Five of her 8 children, plus 2 sons in law and a grandson pre deceased her. She was also widowed, although said at the inquest she hadn't seen him in 16 years.

In 1899, one son was mucking around with a group of friends and had accidentally shot another young man through the temple. He joined the army soon afterwards and was killed in 1915.

Back to her husband. I noticed there was a gap in child production in 1874. Turns out he was in prison, 18 months hard labour for attempting to bugger a cow (as it was then described). He was also convicted in 1898 for buggering a donkey.

He was in and out of prison all his life, mostly for petty theft, finally living on his own in a boarding house. Eventually he threw himself under a train outside Eastbourne, suffering horrific injuries, including severance of limbs, all described fully in the newspapers.

I wrote an article for 'Who do think you are?' magazine some years ago but they wouldn't let me mention the farm animals!

Not my own family, but I saw something on a brass plaque in a church recently which intrigued me - 3 siblings who died within about 10 days of each other, all very young (I think 1 baby, 1 toddler, 1 about 4 or 5). The parents names were on there too (in memory of X, Y, and Z, children of...), middle child had the same first name as the father's first name, the youngest had the same first name as the father, but the eldest had a totally different name. The most intriguing thing though was that they all had the mother's surname, which I would have thought would have been very unusual in the 1800s. There must be a story there, something to do with inheritance I would guess.

Not that interesting a family story, compared to some on here, but when I was a child I remember at Christmas and other family gatherings there was an old man who would be there, on his own. He had no wife or children. I never knew how he was related to us (or if he was), until I did some digging around on Ancestry a couple of years ago. My late dad repeatedly denied that he was a relative of any kind- he had a very old-fashioned hang up about illegitimacy) I found out he was the illegitimate son of my great grandmother's younger sister. His birth mother left the country and emigrated to Australia before WW1, and it turned out she had married out there and had a family, that no-one knew about until many years later.

An interesting fact was that he had been deaf from birth and had never learned to speak. But someone (I'm assuming my GGF rather than the village school) had taught him to read and write and had helped him to become as independent as he could be in those days.

A lot of us will have family connections to Australia through the mass emigration from the early 1900s. At least two other siblings of my GGM emigrated there too.

And there was a lot more illegitimacy than we were ever led to believe. I discovered a sibling of my GGM and his "wife" didn't get married until he was about to be called up for service in WW1. At that point they had had several young children but I assumed they had either not been able to afford to get married or just didn't want to (or one of them had already been married to someone else).

We had one hit by a train, can’t remember if it was 19th or very early 20th c, seemingly he crossed the line as a shortcut to go home after getting his groceries .

I always laugh when I remember his death register entry -

‘Place of death - the railway line
Cause of death - hit by the 4pm train’

Can just picture a brother or son going to registrar who says what happened?

‘Ah, he was hit by a train.’

‘Oh, and so where did this happen?’

‘On the railway line of course…!’

British Newspaper Archive is brilliant for forgotten gems, we found a full article about my great great grandmother’s wedding in 1910 (they worked for an estate in the highlands so it was a significant wedding back then) which detailed even the hat her mother wore, what they ate after and the music played. She’d died in an asylum and none of us knew a thing about her - my gran wasn’t ever permitted to meet her as they were scared insanity was catching !! - so finding that article was like finding gold.

@PennineWayinSlingbacks

Not assumed identities but I discovered some jaw dropping things in my family.

My gg grandmother had quite a traumatic life, though lived to a serene old age herself. Five of her 8 children, plus 2 sons in law and a grandson pre deceased her. She was also widowed, although said at the inquest she hadn't seen him in 16 years.

In 1899, one son was mucking around with a group of friends and had accidentally shot another young man through the temple. He joined the army soon afterwards and was killed in 1915.

Back to her husband. I noticed there was a gap in child production in 1874. Turns out he was in prison, 18 months hard labour for attempting to bugger a cow (as it was then described). He was also convicted in 1898 for buggering a donkey.

He was in and out of prison all his life, mostly for petty theft, finally living on his own in a boarding house. Eventually he threw himself under a train outside Eastbourne, suffering horrific injuries, including severance of limbs, all described fully in the newspapers.

I wrote an article for 'Who do think you are?' magazine some years ago but they wouldn't let me mention the farm animals!

Amazing! Horrible too, obviously, but amazing! My g-g-grandmother had form as long as your arm, including prostitution and two counts of manslaughter (one of which I know was knocking a man over during a drunken row. He hit his head and died). I’m strangely proud of her!

On my maternal grandfather's side I have people I can't trace. Using my grandparents marriage cert., I found grandfather's father (my gt grandfather). Sometimes he went by his given name, and sometimes by his middle name. I found him on a census with his 'parents ' but no siblings, so looked back a decade. Found them again, so looked back at his parents to see his father married to someone else. Except...
There is no record of a marriage or even banns.
She died about 8 years later, and he 'remarried' a few months after that. On thr marriage certificate he says he is a widower.
The name he gives for his father returns no matches with him + fathers name in a family unit on any earlier census returns.
The first "wife" could be one of three possible people but with no banns or marriage record, I cannot trace her either.

My mum has been working on our family tree during lockdown and has found out that her Irish grandfather wasn’t Irish at all. He had a fake accent and a fake life story! He was actually a cockney born and bred and lived not far from where I live now.

He also seems to have had a wife and kids in Australia that he left to come back to England.

@CatrinVennastin

My mum has been working on our family tree during lockdown and has found out that her Irish grandfather wasn’t Irish at all. He had a fake accent and a fake life story! He was actually a cockney born and bred and lived not far from where I live now.

He also seems to have had a wife and kids in Australia that he left to come back to England.

We have an evolving lock down story as well. DH's great grandfather supposedly came to England from Italy, via Malta as a boy soldier. The fly in the ointment is that I found his military records uploaded online showing that he was supposedly born in Wales. He did spend time in Malta with the British army (where he contracted a sexually transmitted disease!!!) but returned to England and fought in WW1.

A relative that DH connected with on a commercial DNA site said that they had been told by a former employer (military) that he was given another man's identity when he arrived in the UK...it seems incredibly far fetched this guy could have been spying and considered a sensitive enough asset to be brought to Britain at around 15-17 years old? This is pre-war, early 20th c. However, we can't find a birth certificate for him either, under the various spellings of his surname he used.

His marriage cert to DH's great grandma lists a (non-Italian) father. This guy evaporates into thin air though and was said to be deceased but the description (railwayman) is right for the area.

DH has tested on Ancestry and 23andme and uploaded to others. Only one of them shows any Italian ancestry. So, like there is 0% on two sites and 11.4% on 23andme. Bizarre. I think it's odd there is none on Ancestry given that a lot of Italian Americans do test. It's not like it's a niche nationality. Everything is coming up 87% or more British Isles, which makes sense from the paper research.

This cousin also has said the DH's ggf could speak Italian and spoke to Italian POWs during WWII. However, he could easily have learned that in the two years he lived in Malta. And also: someone can appear to be 'fluent' in a language to others who don't speak it. I very much doubt the Italian POW would have openly criticised their captors.

Growing up everyone was told not to ask about ggf's background and he wrote mysterious letters to a 'sister' abroad. I have a very strong instinct the 'sister' was someone left behind in Malta, given the reason he spent time in hospital there. He supposedly destroyed the letters/documents that he kept in a secret box before he went to hospital the final time...

He also had a picture of the pope on the wall - everyone was told not to ask about who the man in the picture was.

Military records mention - very faintly - a brother as a next of kin too. DH's dad vaguely remembers that.

It's amazing the secrets that can be hiding in plain sight.

I have almost given up but I can't bear the idea of him getting the better of me! DH has taken a Y-DNA test which traces the male line. We'll see how far that gets us!

My maternal great grandfather Reece William was a bigamist.
His first wife, Alice Matilda who he married in about 1880 had about 11 children including a boy also called Reece William who died in 1974.

Then my great grandfather left London (St Marylebone) but did not divorce her.
He turned up in Salford & married my widowed great grandmother Elizabeth who then had another 11 children with one boy also called Reece William!!

My Grandad Bill (born 1914) never talked about the London family so I assumed he didn't know about his fathers bigamy and first family.. but when he got dementia my Grandad would often say "I'm not a bad old bastard" so I wonder if he actually did know..

My great grandfather Reece was a horrible man by all accounts, he drank away the wages he got as a docker, and the family only had one meal a day & no shoes.
They had to pawn his one good outfit every Monday to make money to last the week.

Reece was a champion bare knuckle boxer as well as a docker known I believe as 'Battler Bill'.
He also hated Churchill as 'he set the troops on the dockers' (according to my Grandad) in one city.
He fought in the Boer war of 1902 but was deemed too unfit at the age of 40 to fight in Ww1.

He would regularly beat Elizabeth until one day his grown up stepson Billy had enough & beat Reece up so badly he moved out into lodgings & died soon after...

@SommerTen
How did you find out about the London family?

This is a really interesting thread and I shall return to read it properly later. I do feel it’s such a shame letter writing has fallen out of favour. I can’t imagine emails will be kept and cherished in quite the same way. I hope all these stories can be retained somehow.

@OVienna My Grandad's nieces found out on Ancestry a few years ago so I checked it out recently on Ancestry myself & it's true .

Relative of mine. Married three times. Twice to much older men who just died quickly after she married them. Her brother was a dodgy fucker who took on an alias to hide what he was up to. There is some newspaper articles about it but it leaves more questions than it answers.

The third husband of my relative had a dark past too. He served in the military in one place. He was done for murder and sentenced to death. It initially was reduced to life and then in very unusual circumstances with a highly unusual case was release very early on licence.

The story that was passed through the family was that he was a war hero in a completely different war.

Its not clear who knew the truth in the family and who didn't.

Id really like to see if the court martial records can be tracked down or the records of the unit he served in for that week to give an idea of what happened.

I also know my great uncle did a runner and changed his name. His two daughters from two marriages were trying to track him down and find out if he was still alive or not. I find that pretty sad. By all accounts he has been some kind of fraudster.

I am also fascinated by long lost cousins who never had any children and as such their life story almost becomes 'lost to history'. Some of them have been utterly fascinating people.