Should I drop a family history bombshell or just say nothing

[Blackberrypresse]

Ive been interested in family history and doing family trees etc for a while.

For Christmas I received a subscription to the British Newspaper Archives so I’ve spent hours happily searching family names.

DH family has an unusual name and the family had stayed all within a small area so it’s been easy to find newspaper articles.

I was very surprised then to find a newspaper article from 1911 about DH’s grandfather being called to court to pay for an illegitimate child he had fathered when he was about 18. It was as a female child (not named) although the mother was named. I’ve drawn a blank on the mother going forward and cannot find the child’s name.

He married quite a bit later in his late 20’s to DH’s grandmother and had his ‘real’ family.

I don’t know whether to say any of this to the wider family. DH’s aunt is still alive in her 80’s and I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t have known that she’d had a much older half sister.

DH is ambivalent about it all, he has no interest in family history and his grandfather died when he was young, he has no real recollection of him.

DH aunt is interested though and I’m torn as to whether to tell her or just let it pass. Her half sister would be probably long dead now but I do think there may be children of her and so a part of the family that we don’t know.

WWYD?

Definitely tell her.

It's only a bit of teenage unmarried nookie; it's not like he was a murderer or anything!

So I think in the past people were quite cavalier with first names.

Not just in the past. FIL's birth certificate says his name is David William Surname. He is known to everyone as Bill. Because there was another David in the family at the time and they wanted to avoid confusion. (Why they didn't just call him William David is a whole other mystery).

She doesn't come across as bitter at all, what on earth are you talking about. She explained in her OP that her DH has an unusual surname and they've stayed in the same area, so it was easier to look for them first.

Yeah @pharaohrocher don’t buy it to honest. It’s literally none of her business anything to do with her husband’s family. I would be furious if I were him. Also you’re not the opinion police

You don't "buy" it? What on earth are you talking about? You are painting the OP as some sort of unhinged loon, on a crusade to discredit her husband's family whereas she's a bog standard family history researcher, doing something which millions of other family history researchers do every day of the week.

It's nothing to be "furious" about. How odd.

Hahah bitter? Not at all!

I’ve done loads of my own family tree via ancestry and also DH’s tree.

Ive uncovered loads about my own family and my very elderly gran was very interested and took everything on board really well.

the newspaper archive subscription is to help uncover more if possible, I’m doing work on both sides of the family.

Some people project like crazy on this site, it’s honestly wild how peoples imaginations run away with them at times.

You sound quite unhinged

It is OPs family for a start and if she is like any other family historian, myself included, she will have a number of family trees on the go at any one time.

Finding information like this is quite normal and not at all strange. All she is asking is about whether to share that and has had some good ideas about that.

You sound unnaturally angry and hostile.

‘I think it’s kinder to just let sleeping dogs lay. I guess I could tell DH’s cousin, it would be up to her whether she felt it would be something for her mother (DH’s Aunt) would want to know.’

I understand your pov, but I don’t know if it a kindness.
Is the DA incapable of cogent thought?
Does she no longer make decisions for herself?
She’s only in her 80s & would likely be pissed off not to be asked a direct question about herself.

Genealogy is one of the most popular hobbies in the UK & US, the ‘ lost rellies’, WDYTYA etc programmes are very popular. Ancestry alone has 30M+ members.

IF DA has expressed an interest, she may have watched stuff on the TV & has a natural curiosity about her own family & social history.

@Blackberrypresse please go with your original comment ‘DH aunt is interested though’ & take that as a start of a conversation of how much she’d like to know.

I made an early mistake in my FH hobby, by thinking that I had found out something difficult & unknown from the past. When I made very tentative enquiries, I was soon put right: turns out everybody knew, no great shakes at the time & barely worth mentioning again.

Do not make an assumption that everyone significantly older is without significant life experience is full of complexity & inconsistencies.
DA was a young woman through the late 60s/early 70s, she will have seen it, heard it & done it as well.

Also interested in the "it's too soon" comment. 1921 census just released after 100 years. This is 11 years before that.

If 111 years is "too soon", then how long are you supposed to leave it??

My Grandad loved doing our family tree, and he did my nans side too (his wife).
They figured out that my Great Grandma’s Dad couldn’t be who she thought he was (due to timings/war etc).
They decided not to tell her but a small time before she died she said to my nan “I’ve been awake all night, I can’t believe I’m going to say this but I don’t think my dad is my day - the dates don’t figure out”.

At which point they had a big discussion about it and said who they thought he was and she agreed. Basically I’m not sure if she always knew and just didn’t say anything and didn’t want to take that knowledge with her or if she honestly didn’t suspect but it was a positive thing for her to know.

On my dads side of the family it’s a bit mashed up after the war due to dads coming back after being in Japan etc and seeing some awful things so kids went to live with other families etc. A lot of Aunties and Uncles who are infact dads etc.

She may already know and be happy to share, she may already know them. She may be mortified.

I think maybe telling the cousin is an idea and they’ll know a bit better to broach or not.

I love family tree. We found out that one of our relatives was hanged for being part of the Luddites or something but I wish I’d have written his name down, because Grandad has been gone a few years now, and all I can think of is Dirk Diggler haha which obviously wasn’t his name but it was something that sounded a bit funny.

I had an entire line like that because of the traditional naming patterns. So the kids were officially named after grandparents etc but never used them.

Francis William was Bill. Margaret Rose was Rosie.

Their brother was a pain to track - Registered as John Arthur, christened as Arthur, married as Arty, died as Arthur John.

His two sisters have remained a mystery as one was Frances Jean and the other Mary Jane. They were christened as such. Appeared on the census as Jean and Jane. One married as Jessie, the other as Jenny - no middle names. Died as Jessie and Jenny.

I wouldn't assume she doesn't know already. Both my and DH's family have similar 'irregularities ' in our family trees. Nothing shocks the older family members anyway.

I think people should be allowed to have their secrets and private lives. It makes me quite uncomfortable to think of people digging through dirt a hundred years later. Seems distasteful to me. Think you should leave it be. Life is much more than 'genetics' anyway.

If only they called people to court for not paying for their children now. I'm more gobsmacked by that bit tbh!

I'm sure your aunt would like to know a bit of history.

But they are allowed to have their secrets and private lives, while they are alive. OP is talking about an adult woman who was applying for child support in 1911 - she was probably born around 1890 and has been dead for decades.

Where do you draw the line? How far back do you have to go for you not to feel "uncomfortable" about it? 99% of family history is not about digging up dirt. 99% of it is tearing your hair out because you can't find a family on a census, or finding out that your 3x great grandfather worked as an Ag Lab.

None of our lives that are recorded in official records are private. These are all public records. Its not digging through 'dirt' unless of course you believe that illegitimate children are 'dirty'.

People seem shocked to find out that anyone can look up births, deaths, marriages, wills. All public records and always have been. Census released after 100 years. All sorts of things in the newspapers, which are rapidly being digitised.

I’d leave well alone. A similar situation occurred in my friend’s family and it has caused so much heartbreak. So many questions couldn’t be answered as the people who could explain were already dead, which just left the rest of the family to wonder what the context to everything was and doubt the relationship they had with the deceased. I’m sure you mean well but you’re trampling over real lives - to you it’s a bit of old family gossip but to others, it’s their lives and their memories that you’re meddling with and potentially upsetting because you’re essentially just nosey.

If 111 years is "too soon", then how long are you supposed to leave it??

100 years is a standard time frame for records to not be for open access - that means the records can be accessed but for good reason. For example hospital records will be unavailable for open access but there may be a reason that you need to access them for medical reasons.

birth death and marriage certificates are public documents and can be ordered by anyone from the register office or local register office

People seem shocked to find out that anyone can look up births, deaths, marriages, wills. All public records and always have been. Census released after 100 years. All sorts of things in the newspapers, which are rapidly being digitised.

And it's not just family historians who look at them. It might be an academic researching attitudes to illegitimacy in the past, or a local historian researching the history of a town or village.

I think elderly people are far less easily shocked than people suppose. By the time someone reaches her eighties, she'll have seen or heard most things before, even if she's lived all her life in St Mary Mead.

I think I would keep quiet. It seems unfair to land a secret sister on an elderly aunt in her 80s, especially when it seems that person is fairly untraceable. No good could come if it for her, she would be left with questions and a feeling of being unsettled or lied to by her father. I think it would cause more pain than good. It would be different if the illegitimate child was traceable and you could give her a list of new relatives to contact, but all you will be doing is handing her a possibly painful mystery that she may not be able to solve.

"(Why they didn't just call him William David is a whole other mystery)."

Loads of people go by their middle names. Not a mystery is it really!

@Eyerollcentral It’s too soon and too close to home to go digging in to this

How on earth is 111 years too soon? My mother traced her half sisters and they have become very close. My Dad didn't find out that a distant uncle was actually his half brother until many years after he died and is pretty devastated by it.

The way that society treated women and children born out of marriage in the past (and some might say today) was really pretty abhorrent at times and it's really important that we all understand that. It's in the past, more than a hundred years ago.

Take it in a stages @Blackberrypresse but the more I know about my family the better.

Quite. What I find a bit odd is that bearing in mind how many ancestors we all have it's pretty unthinkable that all our histories have rogues and harlots, saints and sinners somewhere in the mix.

......all our histories don't have......

Please MN let us edit posts.