We’ve spilled a LOT of family secrets here at BuzzFeed, so we decided to compile the wildest confessions. Here are some of the most shocking things members of the BuzzFeed Community uncovered about their own families — with a few extras from Reddit.
NOTE: There are mentions of suicide, infanticide, domestic abuse, murder, sexual abuse, and sexual assault.
1.
“I grew up with a single mother and no contact with relatives. We moved constantly, and she seemed to have no friends either. If I asked any questions about why we had no relatives or why we were moving again, I would get frozen out, and she would not speak or look at me for months at a time, so I learned to stop asking. When I moved out at 16, I tried to do some research, but this was long before DNA or the internet, and it was very hard to even get a copy of my birth certificate.”
“Cut to much later in life, when I had my DNA done on one of those sites and found some relatives. The whole story came out.
I was too young to remember this, but my parents got divorced when I was a toddler. My mom was about to lose custody of me and my younger brother due to abuse. She decided to pay my father back for leaving her and just disappear with us. That was why we constantly moved and didn’t seem to have relatives. She always used the last name of whatever boyfriend she was hooking up with at the time when registering us for school, and when the schools couldn’t track down our records from our last school, we would disappear and move again. Apparently, my father had tried to find us many times, but it was fairly easy to disappear back then. I am 67 now and still get flashbacks to suddenly understanding now some strange thing that happened back then.”
—Anonymous
2.
“After getting vague answers as to how my mother died, I learned from my maternal grandfather at the ripe old age of 20 that she had died by suicide. I was angry with my family because, apparently, they wanted to keep that a secret forever. I should have been told the truth at age 13, not 20.”
—Anonymous
3.
“On my 18th birthday, I fell asleep on the couch in the basement. My parents and my dad’s parents came downstairs, and did not know I was also there, partially awake. I heard enough of the conversation to realize my dad was actually my biological uncle. My ‘aunt,’ it turns out, was my biological mom, who had been with the wrong crowd when she found out she was pregnant with me. I was born with congenital hydrocephalus as a result of her drug and alcohol use, and she could not handle a medically complex kid. Looking back, it makes sense; my mother and bio mom did not get along. No one knows except for me, and I got it confirmed by a new doctor, completely by accident. Talk about a WILD coming of age surprise…”
—Anonymous, 25, Nebraska
4.
“After my mom passed away, I found out that she had a baby at age 16. My grandmother (her mom) raised him as her own, so I grew up thinking he was my uncle, when he was really my half-brother. We have the exact same birthday, four years apart.”
“Also, in 2019, I found out I have a Vietnamese sister my father fathered when he was in Vietnam. He’d cheated on my mom four months into his one-year tenure there; I still haven’t met her yet.”
—maureenwoodard
5.
“My uncle was a monsignor in the Catholic diocese. Part of his job was to counsel the victims of sexual abuse and convince them not to press charges. He also relocated offending priests to different parishes to get them away from the children who are responsible for the ‘temptations’ that caused rape. It was a big family secret. Frankly, it was a big secret of the church. I don’t think I was supposed to know about it.”
6.
“I have a secret brother (and a couple of other secret siblings). We were only told about him when I went into middle school because my mom forced our dad to. She was afraid we’d meet and start dating without knowing. He’d been in school with us since elementary school. I learned about him on my birthday that year.”
—ruby584
7.
“I found out when I was nine years old that my great-grandfather was a predator. He violated several of his own kids and grandkids, including probably my mother. No one ever did a damn thing about it because I was told it would have torn my family apart and ruined my great-grandma, who I was led to believe didn’t know. I found out later that she probably did. My mother (who abandoned me) had left explicit instructions that I was never to be left alone with him, and to my knowledge, I never was.”
“I always had a weird feeling being around him, but he never did anything inappropriate to me. And yeah, he was heavily involved in the Pentecostal church and was involved in a couple of other Christian organizations. He died 15 years ago now, but it has always bothered me that nobody said anything. I’ve cut them all off because they’re all pretty toxic.”
—thescarletwitch
8.
“I found out as an adult that my biological father date-raped my mother. After that, everything made sense — why she told me when I was six that she was going to have an abortion but it was too late. Why she never liked me. Why I only met my biological father when I was 14 (I was born in 1972), and why he hated me. I’ve thrived, despite both of them.”
—Anonymous
9.
“My grandfather had an affair with my grandma’s sister and even had a child with her. For years, I didn’t know why they lived in separate towns but still remained married until the day they died. I only found out the truth after they both were dead. My grandfather had also cheated on her continuously throughout their marriage with different women. Even to this day, my mom and her siblings have no idea how many potential brothers and sisters they might have out there.”
“The worst thing is that my mother and her siblings speak about it like it’s a normal thing that happened because he was a man and it was accepted back then. I am disgusted to this day and will never see my grandparents the same way EVER again.”
—Anonymous
10.
“As a kid, I overheard my mom and another relative talking about my great-aunt’s second husband, whom I’d never met. When I asked my mom about it, all she’d tell me was that the marriage didn’t last long and that her cousin (I’ll call her Emily) ‘took care of him.'”
“I found out years later that his guy had tried to sexually assault Emily and she beat him so badly that he ended up in the hospital. She was maybe 13 at the time. I’m still not sure if my great-aunt was the one who divorced the guy or if he ran for his life as soon as he could walk again.”
—katieeighty
11.
“My great-grandfather apparently had a child with an affair partner in another state when he was living and working there. During an alcohol blackout, he flew into a blind rage and shot and killed the affair partner, then lived in the house with her body and his young child for a week. Then he took the child back to his other family’s home and killed himself in the basement in front of the child. So horrific and awful for that poor child. No one in the family ever talks about it. I only discovered this in passing.”
—Anonymous
12.
“My aunt (my dad’s sister) married my dad’s lifelong best friend, and they had three kids. She killed herself and her three kids before I was born. Her husband then moved states, and my dad’s first wife took my older siblings and followed him, revealing that she’d been cheating on my dad with his brother-in-law/best friend. I was born five years later and had no idea I had once had three more cousins. I knew my aunt had died young because she was in my dad’s childhood pictures, and when I asked who she was, that’s what I was told. My mom told me everything on my 16th birthday. When my grandmother passed away, I found the news article and tried to ask my family about it.”
“No one would tell me anything except show me pictures of my cousins. My older sister did tell me she remembers my aunt’s husband being around after they moved away from our dad.”
—Anonymous
13.
“My dad died of a heart attack. His heart was bad, but it was somewhat unexpected. My sister saw on his death certificate and showed me at about 28 years old that cocaine was in his system when he died, and they found the baggie in the bathroom. His artery was already blocked 95%, and he’d had chest pains for a few days and had set an appointment for Monday with the doctors. The story I was told was that he was peeing in the bathroom and took a puff of his cigarette, and then that blocked his heart to 100%.”
“In reality, that last cocaine hit on Saturday constricted the artery one last time and closed it. If he hadn’t done it, he’d probably have been rushed into emergency surgery and had a stent placed that Monday, and be alive today.
My mom finally admitted that, yes, he did it consistently. He was a truck driver, so it energized him, too, to do his job better, and eventually, truck driving worsened his dependency on the drug. He had gotten a new job as a trainer right before dying and would have regular 9–5 hours; relocation was required so we’d be away from the negative influences. He was going to start getting help to quit fully and had heard about a new drug that helps with addiction.”
14.
“I discovered that the ‘holiday’ I had at my aunt’s house for a month, where my mum would call me a lot of days crying, was actually me being kidnapped and taken to a secluded town in the middle of nowhere (in rural Australia, where it was four hours to the closest town). My mum didn’t want to call the police at first because she was close to her sister and believed she was being manipulated by another family member (who had successfully kidnapped my brother many years ago). But she eventually called the police, and I was brought back. I had a feeling something was off with the way my mum would talk on the phone, but she didn’t want to scare me at the time. I didn’t find out for sure until a few years later.”
15.
“My grandmother started getting dementia about 10 years ago, and we found out that neither of my mother’s siblings is my grandfather’s child. She had a 15-year affair, and my ‘oops baby’ mother is his only legitimate child. Granny also offed that same grandfather. There’s no way to prove it, though, and at this point, it was over 20 years ago. He fell out of bed and broke his hip, and instead of calling for help, she unplugged all the phones and left him on the floor for three days. She ‘found’ him when the neighbor came by to take him fishing or something, but by that point, he was delirious and half unconscious. He died a couple of days later from a massive stroke.”
“When I was an adult, my mother got drunk (which she never does) and told me that her mother hated him because he was in the military, and they had to move away from her affair partner for several years. She took it out on my mother until my grandfather found out, and then she started taking it out on him.”
16.
“My cousin, who was super ill, actually had a sickness that was preventable with medicine. He died because the woman my uncle married was a religious nut. This was confirmed later when I was an adult. I remember getting told off as a kid because I asked, ‘Isn’t there medicine for what he has?'”
17.
“When I was a kid, my dad abandoned us for a younger woman. When I was in college, my mom told me that when I was much younger, my dad had visited a shaman who was infamous for giving wealth to people who asked and paid. Other than money, the payment usually included the life of one direct family member of the requester. That chosen family member would usually die or lose their mind. After visiting the shaman, my dad gave two items to my mom: a short dagger to be kept somewhere in the house and a meal to be given to me. My mom kept the dagger in their bedroom, but threw the meal away. Years later, after becoming a born-again Christian, my mom gave the dagger away and told me the story.”
“I always knew my dad would prefer my beautiful little sister to me, but I didn’t expect he would be so indifferent as to be willing to sacrifice me for wealth.”
—buzzfeedcommenter
18.
“My aunt Rosa was the only sister not living in the US. She had a child my mom’s age, but no husband, and was never referred to as widowed. I always suspected something dark kept her in Mexico because the subject would get changed when someone brought it up. Back in 2009, I was visiting her and asked her why she’d never moved here. Turns out she did in the ’50s, but her husband was an abusive drunk. He hit her son (my cousin) when he was three and broke his nose. That was the final straw. My aunt waited for him to go to sleep, packed her bags, loaded her car, cut his throat, and ran back to Mexico.”
19.
“My siblings and I could never figure out when we’d get together with my mom’s family why my one aunt was always resentful about my other aunt who had a child out of wedlock. After about fifty years, we finally found out with the passing of my mom. My resentful aunt had a child and was forced to give it up. The reason she had to give up the baby was because she became pregnant by my father — he, my mom, grandparents, and aunt kept it all secret. My brother and I were in between the other baby. Sadly, we connected with the brother and were in the process of meeting when he died of a heart attack. It is so weird that my mom forgave everyone and acted like nothing was ever wrong. I feel so sorry for my mom, who has lived with this for so long. Even on her deathbed, she kept the secret.”
—Anonymous
20.
“My uncle was a spy. I knew he worked for the government, and somehow, I picked up that he got paid by the government to fly to Asia and take pictures. But no one talked about it until years after he retired.”
21.
“My grandfather poisoned my grandmother, and my mother knew. My uncle (her younger brother) helped cover it up by getting rid of the evidence. I only recently found out the truth when I went through a box of my mother’s things years after her death. There were scrapbooks, mementos, pictures of now-gone relatives…and a letter from my mom in an envelope addressed to me with the date of my grandfather’s death under it.”
“It turns out that my grandfather poisoned my grandmother after she confessed to abusing my mother for nearly all of her childhood during a fight they were having. He used some old rodent poison he’d had in the basement and slipped it in her tea. She eventually became ill and showed signs of dementia; she was put into specialized care, where they diagnosed with environmentally caused ALS. She passed shortly after going into care.
He confessed to my mom and her younger brother when it was suggested by the care facility that he get his pipes, groundwater, and soil tested. He acted agitated, which made them suspicious. After they learned the truth, my uncle got rid of the poison and the teacup he’d used. What’s funny is that I inherited the teacup set, and it is indeed a cup short.
My mom expressed a lot of guilt over it. She felt horrified that her father, in her eyes, killed for her, and she also felt a lot of guilt for not feeling sadness for her mother.
I ended up burning the letter just because I felt like my mom would’ve wanted that.”
22.
“My dad was in jail for a few months when I was around 8 years old. I was told he was at work… and he couldn’t call us because it was a really big project. I heard my mom talking about him being ‘locked up’ and thought he got trapped in the vents somewhere? He did HVAC work. It made sense to me at the time, I guess. When he came back, it was like nothing had changed. Turns out he was a drug dealer!”
23.
“My dad was in a ‘relationship’ with my 15-year-old cousin (mom’s side) when she lived with us for a while after her parents died. I was a toddler at the time. My dad was brought in front of a judge, but because my cousin (18 by then) defended him, telling the judge, ‘I know what I was doing; I wanted to be in a relationship with him,’ the whole thing got thrown out. Different times in the ’90s, I guess…I knew there was something weird going on (they were buddy-buddy for a while, and then suddenly she moved out, and they couldn’t be in the same room anymore), but I didn’t know exactly what until my cousin had psychosis and called me at 7 a.m. telling me the whole story. I was 17 when that call came.”
24.
“My mom had a cousin she talked about a lot that died back in the ’70s. She (the cousin) had married a man that abused her. After she got away, she ‘died by suicide’ by jumping off a building. Her husband and his brothers had been seen in the area. Everybody knew they had thrown her off, but nobody could prove anything, so nothing happened to them. Cut to the cousin’s funeral; her husband and his brothers showed up like they wanted to make sure she was dead. For years, that’s where the story ended, as far as I knew. Later on, I found out from another relative who had been there that after the husband and brothers walked into the funeral home’s chapel, some men from my family dragged them back out and didn’t come back in. The men from my family turned up later that day and wouldn’t tell anybody where they had gone; the husband and his brothers were never seen again.”
25.
“My dad was never a Navy SEAL, even though he spent my entire life telling me stories about it. It wasn’t until he died that I found his DD214 (military discharge papers). He was only in the Navy for ten months and was discharged ‘under honorable conditions.’ He never fought in a war. He was never captured or shot. He never shot anyone. He was just a regular guy. I wish he knew that we never wanted him to be anything but our dad.”
26.
“My dad always told me that my birth mom left us when I was two months old. Then the story changed to ‘she died in a car crash,’ and that’s why she wasn’t around. I thought he was just trying to spare my feelings, but it still didn’t make sense even to my kid brain. Fast forward a bunch of years, and I got an email from what turned out to be a cousin who found me on Ancestry DNA. My mother had apparently gone to Cali, then ended up in Florida, where she died of cancer. So most of what my dad told me was horse puckey.”
27.
“My grandpa was murdered by my uncle (married to my mom’s sister). My grandpa sexually abused my mother and her three sisters. He died when I was four. I have vague memories of him.”
“Just after he died, my aunt divorced my uncle. At age 12, I overheard my other uncles talking about a vow they had made to keep me from being a victim of Grandpa. At 16, I figured it out. The uncle who had murdered him was a jeweler who used cyanide in jewelry making. Grandpa drank a 36-pack of beer every night. I suspected he injected cyanide into a random beer. My aunt saw Grandpa alive at 2 a.m. My uncle woke up at 5 a.m., and grandpa was dead and stiff. His body was cremated, and my uncle vanished. I mentioned my suspicions to my cousin, who relayed them to his father.
Three years ago, my uncle was dying. He reached out to me and told me I had correctly figured out how grandpa died. He waited until he was dying since there’s no statute of limitations for murder.”
28.
“As I was cleaning out my dad’s house after his passing, I found letters that my mom and dad wrote to each other around the time they divorced in the early 2000s, as well as a handful of both their diary entries. I have always suspected that my mom cheated on my dad with my best friend’s dad, which effectively ended my first friendship, but those letters confirmed it. But I didn’t know the full extent of what else my mom had done.”
“She sabotaged him by draining their joint bank accounts, racking up tens of thousands in credit card debt, kicking him out of his house, and getting him fired from his job, eventually forcing him into retirement. With him unemployed, he couldn’t afford to pay child support, leaving only my mom’s income, which was barely enough to support us. Basically, if she hadn’t been so vindictive, we wouldn’t have wound up in such dire financial straits.
It’s pretty telling that my dad never spoke ill of her; he just said that he was blindsided and confused by her choices and jealous of her current partner. On the other hand, my mom only ever said negative things about him.”
29.
“My pop (who died before I was born) beat my uncle (his son) to death when my uncle was three. My dad was the youngest of six. They immigrated not long after. The oldest, at 15, refused to come and stayed in England by herself. My father never knew; he was told his brother fell onto train tracks, and he still denies it to this day. He never saw his father be abusive at all; they had a good relationship. But the oldest three siblings all have the same story. We believe they immigrated to escape scrutiny.”
30.
“I used to spend the whole summer break with my aunt, uncle, and cousin (a child from his previous marriage) —months without seeing my mom. Come to find out, those were just trial runs to adopt me because they couldn’t have a child of their own. I do believe that would have meant my mom did not want me, the feeling I always knew to be true.”
31.
“My siblings, cousins, and I were told that two uncles died in a tragic car accident when they were 17 and 20. As an adult, I found out they both died by suicide two years apart, and that one of them may have done it because he was sexually assaulted by a priest. No one in my extended family openly talks about it. I’ve never heard my grandma even say their names.”
32.
“I had a friend tell me that, on her deathbed, his mother confessed that he was adopted and his eight siblings (ALL sisters) weren’t his siblings. He was always uninvited, left out, disallowed at family gatherings (apparently because of his skin tone and facial features), and he told me that he was adopted due to his biological parents being deported back to Northern Africa (Algeria) due to having fraudulent birth certificates and passports.”
—smellycowboy28
33.
“I found the identity of my biological father. Nobody in my family would talk about who he was because my mother was 17 when I was born, and I was the family scandal (back in the early ’80s). I grew up thinking he didn’t know about me or care about me if he did know. I was definitely wrong and found out my family threatened him to stay away from me. I did a lot of digging some years ago and found out that side of the family knew about me and would have loved me very much. I also had siblings. It really made me angry at the family I grew up with. My biological father also died before I got to meet him.”
34.
“One of my aunts had a bad relationship with my grandpa. Grandpa was an asshole, so it wasn’t hard to believe, but she never came around family events, and it was just odd. It turns out that my aunt was in charge of watching her infant sister when she was 10-11 years old; the infant sister died on ‘her watch,’ and Grandpa blamed her for it. I first heard this story when I was 18, about a year after Grandpa died. I knew something fucked-up had happened, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”
35.
“My dad told me this full story on a camping trip recently. Basically, when my grandma and grandpa were still married and had my dad’s older sister, my grandpa was very, very religious, but my grandma wasn’t as invested. My grandpa eventually joined this hyper-religious, cult-like group, which was led by a woman about the same age as my grandma and grandpa. My grandma knew this group was sketchy, but this was the early ’70s, so she felt like she had to go along with it. The group was meeting one night at my grandma and grandpa’s house, and somehow, the leader convinced my grandpa to kill, or at least attack, my grandma, who at that time was pregnant with my dad.”
“So my grandpa went with it. He chased her out of the house with a kitchen knife, all in front of my aunt, who was luckily too young to remember any of this. Needless to say, that was the end of the marriage and the end of my horrible person of a grandpa being involved in his kids’ lives.”
36.
“My grandparents got divorced not long after their last child was born. My parent is the oldest sibling. No one would say why they divorced, and they seemed to get along just fine all their lives. One night, after my grandfather had passed away, my parent drunkenly told me why. The youngest sibling was assaulted as a baby, and everyone thought my grandfather did it. After going to court of some sort and taking a lie detector test, my grandfather was found not guilty, and even the judge apologized to him…something was said to the effect of my grandfather being a simple man who wasn’t capable of such a heinous crime. My parents only just pieced together memories of it being their babysitter’s horrible teenage son.”
“I can never tell anyone, our ‘family’ is so far gone anyway, but the younger ones don’t deserve this burden. I’m the only person who knows all of this, other than my parent, and it weighs heavily on me. I just wish I could hold my grandfather and tell him how sorry I am. He was the best man I’ve ever known. He deserved better.”
—Anonymous
37.
“During my parents’ divorce, my mom was committed to the mental ward (at the hospital where she actually worked). I was told then, at age 12, that my dad had her committed as a divorce tactic to gain leverage. I hated him for that (and other reasons).”
“I recently found out 40 years later that my mom actually overdosed back then in an attempt to kill herself. She did end up killing herself by a fatal overdose when I was 28. Then, when I was 40, I was informed by an attorney that my dad also killed himself. Both were destitute and couldn’t face their demons. To me, it all originated from that lie when I was 12.”
—Anonymous
38.
“My parents told me that my brother was extremely successful. They had a carefully crafted, long explanation on how he became so successful. But the truth is that they helped him marry a 96-year-old woman at the age of 55 so he could inherit everything she had. I was shocked and disgusted by what they did to help him — they were not the parents I knew. I would’ve never found out, but a day after my mother was buried, my brother decided to show me videos and explain where his money came from…without me asking. I wish he had just let them die with their secret.”
—Anonymous
39.
“My family kept who my biological father is from me. It wasn’t until I did a DNA ancestry test that I found out that my biological father was my mother’s high school chemistry teacher. It was a big scandal at the high school. The teacher was also the girls’ varsity basketball coach and had been sleeping with several girls from the team. Not only did I find out who my father was, but I also found three half-siblings.”
—Anonymous
40.
“When I was 2, my bio mom took off, never to be heard from again. Growing up, I would always ask about her and if she wanted to meet me. I was always told he had no idea where she was; she vanished, and I probably would never see her again. Fast-forward to when I was an adult. I tracked her down thanks to some internet sleuthing and found out I also have four siblings. Long story short, my father never lost touch with her and always knew where she was and how to get in contact with her. In fact, she lived less than 10 minutes away from me for years. He just made the decision that I would be better off without her, and she didn’t care to fight it, so he lied to me for most of my life.”
“It would have been nice to know my family, especially my siblings. I was raised as an only child with no real extended family, and as much as I would love a close relationship more than anything, we’re not all close.
I know she could have tried to see me or build a relationship, and he was doing what he thought was best to protect me (he was sort of right…), but he’s gone now, and so is the majority of my family, so it hurts being alone knowing that I have immediate family out there.”
—Anonymous
41.
“My grandfather, who had helped raise me from the age of 10 due to having been removed from my mother and stepfather’s home for severe physical, emotional, sexual, and psychological abuse, was a convicted sex offender, and there was a distinct possibility I was born from incest.”
“Thankfully, the DNA test I took showed I wasn’t, but it was a frightening possibility. He’d fought in Vietnam and was ‘honorably’ discharged the year I was born. Come to find out, he was forced to retire because the Army found out about the charges against him.
I found out when, as an adult, I rented a property to him. He got drunk and was talking to me about being worried about not being able to move. When I asked why, he just bluntly said, ‘Because I’m a registered sex offender. I was in jail for two years after you were born because I was having sex with your mother.’ To say I was shocked was an understatement. This was a man I regularly had let watch my two boys. And to make matters worse, that meant the state Child Protective Services, knowing he was a sex offender, placed me in his home as a preteen. My mother confirmed the story and said it was consensual (yuck). After the DNA test was clear, I cut the entire family out for keeping me in the dark.
The sad thing is, that wasn’t the only revelation that night. Come to find out, he had been sleeping with my ex-wife before he got with the woman he was moving in with.”
—Anonymous
42.
“One night when I was 16 or so, I was lying on the couch in the living room while my parents, aunt, and her husband were getting drunk on the pontoon boat parked on the pier. Eventually, my aunt came in, and she was pretty drunk. She sat down on the end of the couch and thought I was sleeping. She said, ‘Your mom killed my baby Tony. Pushed him out the window. I’ll never forgive her for that.'”
“A few days later, I asked if my aunt had a son before my cousin. Turns out, it was after. My mom was 16 and left home to help with the kids in Chicago. Apparently, my aunt was dating a mob guy who was married and abusing my aunt. My mom’s solution was to get rid of the kid so that my aunt could be safe. As long as the baby was alive, this guy would be in her life.
My cousin didn’t even know she had a brother until she was in her thirties. They got rid of all his pictures and things, and he was just erased from their lives. The Chicago police ruled it an accident. My mom said she walked in, and he was pushing against the screen and fell out. The idea that a six-month-old baby was both tall and strong enough to push a screen out of a fourth-floor apartment window seems ridiculous to me, but she got away with it. My aunt told me what really happened and, to be honest, I’m not a bit surprised. That woman is a monster.”
—Anonymous
43.
“I’ve learned that my family is full of secrets, some really dark. I’ll share this one; I learned when I was a teenager that my Nan and my great-aunt (they’re twins) married their biological brothers and had children with them. They each had multiple miscarriages, and the babies that made it to term and were born died shortly after — all but one. My Nan’s first daughter (my eldest aunt) is a product of incest and is still living today. My Nan is especially close with her and sort of obsessed with her. She holds her in higher regard than anyone else, including her other kin. They have a very twisted, codependent relationship.”
“The only reason my Nan and great-aunt ended up with different men (my Nan with my granddad) is that a distant relative found out about the incestuous affairs and contacted the brothers’ higher-ups to report their marriages (they were in the military). They were dishonorably discharged, and the news of why spread. It became a public shame, which led to divorce. My Nan’s brother/ex-husband hung around even after she remarried to my grandfather, who knew everything. Sadly, it’s come out since his passing that she never really loved my granddad, and she was never happy with him. She was severely abusive to my mom and her siblings, save for the eldest.
I found out through my aunt. One day, she was looking through an old trunk she found in the attic, and she discovered a collection of paperwork, photos, and certificates, including the birth certificates of deceased children belonging to my Nan and her brother, along with one for the surviving child, their eldest sister. She spilled the beans to my mom and their brother, and it’s since made its way down the line.”
44.
“When I was about 13 (many, many years ago), my parents told me that the man I knew as my dad wasn’t my biological father. Mom said that my real father had alcoholism and wouldn’t get a job, so she left him and eventually remarried. I didn’t really think about it much because my adopted dad was great, and I got to grow up in a very loving family. Years passed, and every now and then, I would Google my biological father’s name. Nothing ever came up until one day I found out that around the time I was born, he went to jail for assault. Later, he got out on parole and raped and killed someone. From what I can tell, he’s still alive and on Death Row.”
“But I rarely think about the situation. I know I was blessed to have a much better life than I would have had if he had been in it.”
45.
“I found out that my maternal grandfather (whose home we often had sleepovers at as children) molested my mother and aunt their entire lives, leading to my mother having an abortion at 12 years old with my grandfather’s child. AND THEY STILL LET ME SLEEP OVER AT HIS HOUSE.”
—Anonymous
46.
“When I was a kid, my parents told me that my dad’s father died of a burst appendix several years before I was born. I found out after my dad died that this wasn’t true. I knew my dad’s parents had split up, but apparently, they did because his dad was cheating on his mom. A few months after they split, his dad murdered his affair partner and then died by suicide in a hotel. I learned this when we were cleaning out my dad’s apartment and found newspaper clippings and letters to my dad from various family members about the incident. The only true thing from the original story I was told was the date his dad died.”
—magicaltooth53
47.
“My dad has a whole second family. The older kid is exactly nine months younger than me, and the younger kid was born like 10 days before my sister was born.”
48.
“I discovered that my grandpa was a mobster, but that he never went to jail because his brother (my great uncle) was an agent with the FBI and kept him protected.”
49.
“My cousin-in-law raped his niece and got her pregnant. They were both young teens at the time. His mother is the niece’s grandmother, and she had custody of her. She is a monster. She would make the girl sleep on the floor next to her bed — so how she even let this happen is inexcusable. She then made her give up the baby, who has issues because of the inbreeding. This happened four years ago, and we’re just now finding out about it because the niece is an adult now and finally speaking up about it.”
50.
“My mom has been lying about our biological father for 50 years. She always told us he abandoned us when I was five. All my relatives would say how weird it was because he was such a doting dad. One day, she accidentally slipped and confessed to my cousin that she used to throw away all the cards and gifts he sent my siblings and me for Christmas and our birthdays because she decided it was better if he wasn’t in our lives due to his alcoholism.”
—Anonymous, 50+, USA
51.
“When I was young, I was told my grandfather was murdered in his home in a break-in gone wrong. I later found out (through my own Internet research) that he was actually murdered in a drug deal gone wrong. He was the drug dealer.”
52.
“My dad was molested as a child by his older sister until he was ‘old enough to fight back.’ My mom told me after he showed up to my 15th birthday dinner late and absolutely plastered, when I asked why he had alcoholism and if it was my fault. He never knew I knew, and no one else in the family knows about it at all. He died from his addiction almost two years ago, and I’ve spent years trying to balance the man who emotionally abused us for years with that scared little boy.”
53.
“After my brother passed, I requested his mental health records, which indicated our father sexually molested him as a child. I was really close to my father and brother and feel like I would have known, but I don’t want to be one of those family members who say it never happened when it did.”
—Anonymous, 60, Colorado
54.
“My mom got kidnapped when she was like 13 and was never reported missing because she was a ‘bad kid’ who got into trouble often. She was dropped off a month later at the same spot where she was taken. I love my grandparents, but I always looked at them differently after finding out.”
55.
“When I was 18, I discovered the lawsuit against my grandpa for groping my cousin. She was 15. I was 8 at the time. My parents left me alone with him after this, even though my cousin swears it happened. I didn’t know the truth until I found my estranged cousin as a teenager, and my parents had the audacity to tell me that she was toxic.”
56.
“When I was a kid, my uncle was in prison for something that was unbeknownst to me at the time. My grandma would take me to visit him every once in a while (not that often, as it was my dad’s side of the family, and I saw them every other weekend). I would always ask why he was in there, but they would just say that I was too young to know. Years later, I found out that he had inappropriate pictures of his daughter on his computer. The fucked-up thing is that he’s still with the mother of said daughter.”
57.
“My dad was in prison for manslaughter before he met my mom. How did I find out? A simple Google search of his name. Was it really him? Yeah, there was a mugshot. I haven’t told anyone in my family. But it sure explained a lot about him.”
58.
“My dad left when I was a baby, leaving my mum to raise me with support from her parents. My mum and I had my dad’s surname, so I assumed they’d gotten married even though there were no photos. My mum did have a gold band, but she didn’t wear it on her left hand. I learned as a teenager that my dad had a wife before my mum, with whom he’d had twin boys. But I assumed they’d gotten divorced and he remarried. It wasn’t until my mum had the start of dementia and was ‘sorting’ some paperwork, that she revealed that she’d just changed her name by deed poll and given me dad’s surname.”
“She obviously did it so as not to appear to have born a child out of wedlock (it was the early ’80s, so I guess there was still a bit of stigma about such things). I went 40+ years before I discovered her secret.”
—blahblahblah124
59.
And finally… “My dad killed his best friend in a DUI when he was 22. My dad spent years in a wheelchair and time in prison. He turned his whole life around before I was born: 30 years of sobriety, 20+ gallons of blood donated, countless acts of selflessness. But I was never supposed to know. He became a different person before I was born. But he told my mom once, while having a breakdown in his 30s. Then my mom told my brother because my brother was driving drunk. Then my brother told me. I still pretend I don’t know. My dad deserves the life he has built now; he tries to be a good person every day. I wish I didn’t know…it lives in the back of my mind.”
What family secret did you discover as an adult? Let us know in the comments or via this anonymous form.
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
Dial 988 in the United States to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The 988 Lifeline is available 24/7/365. Your conversations are free and confidential. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. The Trevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ youth, is 1-866-488-7386.
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.
If you are concerned that a child is experiencing or may be in danger of abuse, you can call or text the National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453 (4.A.CHILD); service can be provided in over 140 languages.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
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