Feeling sad after uncovering difficult family history through genealogy research

[WhatAShock91]

I just feel terrible. Turns out he was Russian, he was arrested as a political prisoner alongside his dad and brother. His dad died whilst in the concentration camp. He's under 2 different names with the same prisoner number, ( names sound very similar just spelt differently )

I just feel very sad reading about it. His poor mum must of been devastated.

My parents grew up / met each other in care, so I didn't know too much about our family history, just pieces. I feel really sad finding this out. I grew up being told he was a horrible, angry, abusive man and I'm just so sad for him and my mum.

I think that’s the risk with genealogy. The way I look at it, is that it explains certain things. So your grandfather wasn’t a bad person, just an abused one. I realise it’s a shock but you will come to terms with it as it explains a lot of stuff.

I found out that my dad had been in prison and my grandfather tried to have my grandmother murdered!

I have slave traders and plantation owners among my more distant ancestors. That’s not easy either!

That's partially why it's made me so sad, I'm sad reading about the camp he was in and thinking how badly that must of affected him, and I'm sad knowing he could of been a lovely man if he wasnt traumatised. It explains why my mum is the way she is too. I can really see how trauma has passed down through generations.

I found out on my other side of the family that they were Irish and moved from Ireland to Liverpool. My grandparents on that side met at the docks,

That must of been a shock about your grandparents and ancestors. I hadn't thought I was going to find anything like this I was just interested to see what our nationalities were 😭

My mum had 4 children and 2 of us were olive skinned with dark hair and the other 2 were very pale with light hair. I've gone on to have two DC and I have one olive and one pale,

I half wish I hadn't looked now

Family genealogy is a Pandora’s box.

@Lazingsundayafternoon It is, You never know what you are going to find out, and sometimes it can come as a considerable shock.

IMO, drawing up any family tree in Victorian times and before is most likely going to be sad - just looking at the child mortality rates for a start. I don’t know how parents coped with the cumulative grief of having say ten children and maybe only two live to grow up?

I also found a number of criminals among my ancestors - mainly family men, who I suspect were driven to steal, due to poverty and trying to feed themselves and the children. One of my ancestors was hanged for forging bank notes, and another did five years hard labour for stealing a flock of sheep!

Then, there was the hypocrisy about illegitimate children - which occurred in every generation in my family, upto the 1920s. I was shocked to find my supposedly Christian and god fearing ancestors, lying that they were married in censuses - when the birth and marriage records showed they weren’t married!

"My parents grew up / met each other in care, so I didn't know too much about our family history"

"Turns out he was Russian, he was arrested as a political prisoner alongside his dad and brother. His dad died whilst in the concentration camp."

I'm sorry but this rather confuses me. Was it your dad, uncle and grandfather who were in a concentration camp?

Or was it your grandfather, his brother and your great grandfather?

As other posters have said, this really is not any reason to "wish I hadn't looked now" . Learning about the reality of our ancestor's lives helps to put their decisions or actions into a perspective that we might better understand.

As @Parcell rightly observes:

"So your grandfather wasn’t a bad person, just an abused one. I realise it’s a shock but you will come to terms with it as it explains a lot of stuff."

.

But I was really intrigued by what you said, especially if this is about your grandfather:

"...he was arrested as a political prisoner..."

"...I'm sad reading about the camp he was in..."

Was this in the 1930s at all? Or was it much later? If this was in the 1930s, would you mind sharing where this information comes from? Either openly or by DM?

For context, my brother-in-law's wife is Russian. She is in her late 40s.

Her family has a story that her paternal grandfather and his parents were arrested and sent to the Siberian gulags in the early 1930s.

His parents were reasonably wealthy farmers (in that they employed men and boys to work on the farm) living around 100 miles north of Moscow. Then in the early 1930s, the family were denounced as 'kulaks' and shipped off to a Siberian gulag.

His parents never returned but my brother-in-law's wife's grandfather managed to escape or, by some other means, otherwise managed to return shortly afterwards.He eventually married and ended his days keeping a couple of cows on a few acres of land to the north of Moscow in a small wooden house, one half of which the family lived in and the other half housed the cows and their hay etc.

Incidentally, it was through speaking to her family that I first came across the term 'perestroika' used in an everyday way - rebuilding the house to convert the cow barn - rather than the political connotation of the word (political reform movement in the late 1980s)

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Sorry, I was going totally off tangent there. In summary, her grandfather and great grandparents were arrested as political prisoners in the early 1930s and sent to .

I haven't been able to trace anything at all about this part of their lives. If the concentration camps that you speak of are anything at all related to the Gulags in Siberia in the 1930s then I really would welcome any hints or pointers at all.

I had a great uncle and uncle in law who both died in WW1 and left young wives and children. My grandma had 2 siblings who committed sucide and 2 that died in tragic accidents. It haunts me so much!

Oh and a great grandfather that was in court due to non payment of child maintenance. My family were so so poor.

Grandma had two babies that died, one at a Day old and one at 2 years old.

Is this your grandfather op ? My G GF was badly shell shocked after WWI, they called him ‘funny in the head’. Another relative was sent to the workhouse as a child for being an ‘imbecile’. On a different note another spent a few weeks in a Victorian prison for being a nuisance whilst drunk and naked ! And my grandad was born in a brothel

My great grandfather and several of the family were in the workhouse too! Think I I need counselling!!

It was my grandad, my mums dad. He was with his dad and brother, his dad died whilst in the camp and his brother died a few weeks before everyone was released

It was early 1940's they were captured. I've found a lot of information about my grandad on

https://arolsen-archives.org/en/

I've even found his picture..... he has pointy ears ( I have round ) and my DD has pointy ears and my DS has 1 pointy ear 😅..... I've always wondered where the pointy ears came from. My ds has a look of him

Apparently his sister returned to her homeland but my grandad went to the UK. He had a shit time over here aswell, it wasn't great for him.

He tried to trace his family at one point and wrote somthing like "they don't want us here and I can't go home or I will be killed"

My mum remembers lots of racial abuse when she was very small and being very poor

I get this OP, After a very mixed up family history on my maternal side, lots of lies and deception. I'd found out two family members had killed a police dog and disfigured a policeman for life and that they were just generally really awful people, always causing trouble. And in all honesty the saying for my maternal side that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree rings very true in the next generation of her family unfortunately too. It's not just learnt behaviours but also inherited. It's such a can of worms to delve into.

But on another note I'd managed to go all the way back to the 1400's and find some Sirs etc on my Paternal side which was pretty fascinating.

Yes my grandad. I believe he would of had terrible PTSD.

I knew my mum had been taken into care as her mum had become very unwell and they were very poor.....from what I have gathered online, my grandad was very very wary of any authority figure and refused to engage with social services when they came. Oh I feel terrible for him all over again.

The whole tree is just full of trauma it's terrible.

I found out that my dad's grandad who he adored was in court quite a few times, once for taking out a young boy's eye with a catapult (ggf was about 12). One of my other ggf was born in a workhouse (his mother's second 'offence') and farmed out when his dm disappeared. One of my ggm stole from her workplace (laundry) and her dh, my ggf had a terrible record during ww1 for bad discipline.

Exactly the same in my family history. He spent time in gaol for it.

I dont know much about my recent ancestry, my dad (born 1920s) wiuld never talk about it. The most i ever got out of him was that his mother and other family members were alcoholics. Probably drank cheap booze to blot out how awful life was living in misery and poverty. The 21st century's poverty is worlds away from what it was back then.
My Dads favourite mantra to us kids: "you lot dont know you're born" He trotted it out on an almost daily basis with heavy hints that we were ungrateful for being fed and clothed 😉

It all makes me realise that writers like Thomas Hardy were not guilty of melodrama but were describing lives as people did live them! My great granddad and his siblings were trailed up by an alcoholic father and his abused wife, he was in a reformatory from the age of 12 as was his sister. His sister had an appalling life - industrial school as a child, then prison, gave birth in the workhouse, the child died, drifted, more jail time for theft, married a man who died in WW1, seems to have been institutionalised for years (not surprised tbh) then burned to death in a fire shortly after her release. All unremitting misery, and thank God for reform and the welfare state, is all I can say.

My grandparents both signed the Pledge, due to growing up and seeing men drink away their wages on a Friday night, leaving the wife with very little to feed the children all week. Even, when I was in my teens, they only just about had a sherry at Christmas!

@AInightingale sounds similar to my great grandma's cousins' upbringing. Their mum was an alcoholic and constantly in and out of gaol. They were both in court for stealing sheets from a washhouse and sent to industrial school. One of them got married, his wife had a baby which died of 'cot death' when he was a few months old and he killed himself - was only in his mid 20s (1920s). My great great great grandma looked after their younger siblings (her great grandchildren) whilst their mother was in gaol (1911 census) and she was in her 80s. Her eldest son, my great great grandad had killed himself in 1892 after his 10 year old son drowned in the river Tees. My great great grandma was pregnant at the time.

Those are such tragedies @Manthide Makes you angry that no one was protecting these vulnerable children but criminalising them for acts of theft which were probably committed out of desperation. My ancestors were in court as children for stealing bread, stealing broccoli from a garden (?), nicking a spoon from an employer, and stealing a penny someone had dropped. And they got sentenced to reform schools for those things!