Have you ever discovered or been told anything shocking about family members or relatives? We all remember Phil’s mum, but dogging is normal these days.
I found out recently that my great great grandfather was imprisoned for piracy in North Africa, but the king of Sweden bailed him out for some reason. He was then later accused of being a pirate in Argentina and his ship came under fire. Mostly due to having a very international crew.
I also found out that my cousin worked as a very overpriced escort when she was at uni.
One of my great-grandads was a habitual felon in the early 1900s and went to prison several times for offences like fraud, extortion, forgery, grievous bodily harm and lewd conduct. My grandad somehow came by some of his old prison medical records, and in one of them, it said something like, commitment to a mental institution should be considered due to the unregenerate nature of the inmate.
Nobody really ever talked much about my great-grandad in my family, also because my great-grandmother eventually divorced him. She then married somebody else, who was from much better social circles and allowed my grandad to enjoy a solid upper middle class upbringing.
My grandad only really started sharing stories about his dad in his old age because he felt they needed to be passed on before he went. I guess at some point when my grandad was an adult, he got back in touch with his biological dad because he felt sorry for him.
Could be. What is known is that he married my great gran when she was 17 and he was approaching his late 30s. But if I remember the stories correctly, there were also rumours that he was a bit of a closet bumder and had occasional relations with young men, which surely would have counted as lewd conduct back then.
How'd you find stuff like this out? It sounds like you've been on Who Do You Think You Are?. I know finding out about your ancestry is technically something anyone can do, but not everybody has a television production crew following them around.
Unless you're told all those details by your parents or grandparents, I'm sure most of it will just be forgotten about as generations pass, unless your ancestor was actually in any way famous and/or a public figure. Even if you find out via some ancestry site who your great-great-grandparents were, in all likelihood all you'll ever have is their name, but not much information about how they lived out their lives.
