To want to know more about this family history stuff...or should it all just stay in the past?

[Rojan]

I never met any of my fathers family. I was told his mum died when he was a young child, and his dad also had died years earlier, and accepted that. My dad was brought up from infancy to age 11 by his maternal grandparents as his mum had severe MH issues. At 11 his dad remarried, and he moved to live with him his new wife and their children.

Many years later when my dad died, I found out that he had (during my lifetime) been living under a different name to his birth name. He'd taken my mum's surname and used his middle name as a first name. So if he was John Edward Smith and my mum was Jane Brown, he called himself Eddie Brown. My parents were never married (I didn't know this while they were alive) and my dad was married to someone else.

I did some research after my dad died, and found his real name, and details of his parents and his wife (I recently found out she only died 2 years ago). His dad died when I was a teenager, and his mum died when my dad was in his 30s, not a child. I couldn't find any details of divorce or subsequent marriage for his dad.

I just have so many unanswered questions about it all. Particularly my grandmother, was she in an institution for 30 years? Did my dad even know or did they just tell him she died?

There's no one I can ask about this, my dad had a close friend who died before him but no others. None of my mums family who are still living knew anything about my dad's life before he met my mum. I don't know to what extent I can research via Ancestry or similar - or whether I'd just be wasting my time?

I don't know why I want to know. Part of me thinks maybe some stuff I'm not meant to know, and if i do delve into it all, what will I do with that information? But I keep coming back to it.

I think it’s both interesting and educational from a sociological perspective.
I think it’s worth researching.

If you're curious, you just have to be prepared that you could find out ANYTHING - good as well as bad. And be prepared for that.

My mum had some answered things,but guessed that there were some bad secrets. And there were! But she was prepared.

I think it's awful to leave things like this in the past, I would want to know

I’d want to know too.
My paternal grandmother is the result of a WWII fling. She never knew who her real dad was. Her mother met and married my grandmother’s step-father when she was pregnant and that was that. It wasn’t mentioned again until years later when she was told as a teenager that the man who’d raised her was her younger brother’s dad but not her’s.
All my great grandmother had was a name. No contact information, no pictures, nothing. So again it went quiet and no more questions were asked.
About 10 years ago, when my great grandmother was long dead, my uncle came across some of her things in my Nan’s loft and that brought it all up again, so he decided to dig further. He used online Ancestry type databases and did a 23-and-Me dna test, and ended up tracking down the family of my grandmother’s biological father in America. Turns out he was an American soldier who was stationed in the area during the war. He was also dead, but his family had absolutely no idea of my Nan’s existence and were pretty sure that he didn’t know about her either!

My family history has a murderer white supremacist, non murdering but destructive white supremacists, a strong willed woman willing to burn the family house down to effect change, and misogyny that actively physically harmed women. These aren't things I'm proud of, at all, these facts make me uncomfortable, but these are the people who came before me and I value not being blind to it.

why is it awful

I don't think a DNA test will help. You're wanting to find out details of relationships not discover secret relatives.
If you know your gran died two years ago, did you get a copy of her death certificate? It will tell you where she died and who registered the death. That should at least answer your question about whether she was still living in a MH facility and also give you a contact name for trying to find out more concerning her contact with your DH as an adult, etc.

We had an unknown scandal in our family (my mother's grandfather became estranged from his wife, who was pretty horrible by all surviving relatives' accounts, and the family surname was changed officially) but my mother's generation were never told what had really happened and she was longing to know. After she had died (unfortunately) I was doing family history stuff, just in general about lots of branches of our family and I put a post on Knowhere guide for a town in Scotland my own grandfather came from. Someone replied about 2 years later and turned out to be the granddaughter of my mother's scandalous grandfather from his second family that we didn't know existed. They didn't know we existed either. She and I unravelled the scandal. My DM's grandfather had a v unhappy marriage with his unpleasant first wife . He then fell in love with his cousin and eventually went to live with her - this was around 1920 and they had two children. They weren't able to marry because nasty wife refused a divorce. He had changed his surname so that he and his new partner shared the same surname, presumably to conceal the fact that he was not married to the mother of his second family (very scandalous in those times). Nasty wife then changed her and her children's surnames to the same one out of spite. I think family history is fascinating. When we found all this out all the main player were very long dead so no-one was upset (apart from my new cousin who took a long time to accept that her grandparents had not been married - she said her grandmother was a very "proper" Victorian-type lady and she couldn't imagine such a thing - we found absolutely no record of a marriage).

Sorry if I wasn't clear, the person who died 2 years ago was the lady that my dad was married to. My dads mum died many years before I was born.

What was a bit unexpected was that she lived in the same part of London as my mum was from. When I found out about the marriage (and lack of divorce) I'd assumed she had moved away or even abroad. I guess thats something I won't ever know about.

I've been thinking and part of it is probably because I know a lot about my mums side. There are some amazing women on that side, my 2 great grandmothers in particular. My dad did tell me a little about his childhood and maternal grandmother, but said almost nothing about his mum, and I would really like to understand more about what happened to her, it makes me sad to think she may have been in an institution for most of her life.