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.