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Knyteguy posted:Grandma's aunt had a kid very young out of wedlock circa world war 1. Her parents adopted the grandbaby and the baby was always told her mom (the aunt) was her sister. Weird situation. I'm a genealogist, and this situation is actually much, much more common than anyone would think. Not nowadays of course, but before 1970 (because by 1970, people stopped getting their panties in a bunch about single mothers.) After a while, you can even start spotting it on US Census records in families that you otherwise don't know the first thing about. You find a household where the mother is 50+ and her youngest child in the house is 2 or less? Look a little closer at that list of kids, and there's always an unmarried teenage daughter in the house. My hobby now is "genetic genealogy," which involves using DNA testing for genealogy, so even in cases where the official paper trail was falsified, the DNA is outing family secrets all the time. Even family secrets that are 200 years old.
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Oct 9, 2015 19:06
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deep impact on vhs posted:somewhat related, anyone have good luck with those ancestry sites? kinda interested in finding out more about my family They're very useful, but not in the way that many people think. You can't type your name in (or your parents' names) and magically get a family history. The sites are repositories for documents (generally government documents) that may or may not contain the names of your ancestors. People often to get the idea that they can sign up and then get an already-compiled family history, which is not the case. I've been doing genealogy for around 20 years now, and I still have years of work ahead of me. It's extremely interesting, but more complicated and time-consuming than most realize. Your luck with the sites will depend on how far back your family has been in America, and beyond that, what country they came from. Family in America since colonial times? You're golden. You're American, but your father immigrated to America from Malaysia? You'll find basically nothing. If your ancestors came from another English-speaking country (or at least a "white" country), then you've at least got a chance of finding records there. That being said, Ancestry usually offers 2-weeks-free trials, so you might as well try it out. ChairmanMeow posted:did you find any genetic matches? Anyone who is any kind of "white" will have thousands of matches via the DNA tests at Ancestry and 23andMe. Anyone who is black will still likely have thousands of matches. The only time you end up with few matches (and by few, I still mean 100+,) is if you're from a population who is unlikely to have purchased DNA testing. If you're American but you were born in China to 100% Chinese parents and adopted by American parents then you will have very few matches, because nobody in China is buying DNA tests. Regardless of your race/ethnicity, most of your matches will be from so far back in time that you won't have any idea how you're related to them. Like, you share an ancestor back in the 1600's. And if you come from a significantly inbred population (Ashkenazi Jewish, French-Canadian, Amish, etc) then just lol, because it breaks the relationship-predicting system. You'll have a buttload of people showing up as your 2nd cousin when in reality they're actually your 4th cousin on your mom's side plus your 5th cousin on your dad's side, plus their grandparents were 1st cousins to each other plus they're all each other's 7th cousin, etc. All those tiny bits of DNA from distant ancestors add up and makes it look like they're a much closer cousin than they are. But again, it's still very interesting, and you always have a chance of unearthing some crazy skeletons of your own, or helping someone else out with theirs. Be forewarned that I've been doing the DNA stuff for 6 years now and people discover shocking secrets from it ALL THE loving TIME. Their dad isn't their dad, they are the product of donor sperm, they're adopted and were never told, they or one of their parents is the product of incest, etc.
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Oct 10, 2015 19:28
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I guess I'm the skeleton in someone's closet, though he doesn't know it yet. My mother got pregnant as a teenager at boarding school, and had me. She felt 100% sure that my father was her boyfriend there, but fast-forward 30-something years and DNA testing showed he isn't my father. Now my mother claims not to know who my father is, but she's a homeless heroin addict, so she's not exactly reliable and may just be refusing to say. Either way, some dude is probably going to have the shock of his life when I figure it out. My great-grandmother was from England. About 10 years after she was born, her mother (my great-grandmother) was sent to the county asylum, in approximately 1903. This place:  Her husband pretty promptly packed up the kids and moved the family to America, abandoning his wife to the asylum. She stayed there until her death in 1925. I've heard she was schizophrenic, but that's secondhand knowledge, so I don't know the truth. There are some surviving documents from the hospital, but they're sealed for 100 years after the death of the patient, so I've got another 10 years to wait. It's unlikely there are even detailed records, but even the admission log giving a few words about why she was admitted would be interesting to see. Additionally, once the aforementioned great-great-grandfather brought my great-grandmother and his other kids to America, he he sent my 12-year-old great-grandmother to live in a stranger's home and be their live-in maid. I'm pretty sure he probably collected her earnings from that too. I've got about a million other skeletons in the closet. We're a family of miscreants and ne'er-do-wells.
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Oct 12, 2015 19:37
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Werong Bustope posted:My dad's side of the family is the usual boring illegitimate kid deal - his mum got knocked up while her husband was a POW during WW2 and when he got back from the war he walked in on a kid too young to be his and walked right the gently caress back out again. Her highly religious family threatened to disown her if she didn't put my dad in an orphanage so she did - only she couldn't deal with giving him up so she went and got him back again six months later and went off to work as a servant in posh houses for 6 years, until she met up with her husband again and he took her back. Really messed my dad up and gave him serious abandonment issues, not to mention that she never did tell him who his real father is. His stepdad was a pretty cool dude though and he legally adopted my dad and raised him as his own son. Just as an FYI, he may be able to find out who his biological father is (if he's interested) by doing a DNA test at either Ancestry.com or 23andMe.com. This sort of thing is a hobby of mine, and adoptees are finding their bio families this way every day.
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Nov 19, 2015 02:02
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Werong Bustope posted:He's talked about doing something like this in the past but never went through with it. He's not come out and said as much, but I think he doesn't really want to know. He has talked about how, as a kid, he would imagine his father as a member of the aristocracy or a GI or something similarly glamourous* but in his heart he always assumed it was just some Glaswegian docker like everyone else he's related to. Ah yeah, if he's Ashkenazi, that will make things less clear; you are all pretty much related to each other in 5 different ways, so detangling Ashkenazi DNA connections is much harder. Though if any very close relatives had also tested (1st cousins or closer) from that side, you'd still have an answer. Though you would at least be able to tell if his bio father is Ashkenazi as well.
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Nov 20, 2015 07:27
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